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Toadkiller_Dog's picture

Bibliography

I'm not the author of the article, but here are some good resources for European martial arts.

The best one-stop-shop on the web is http://www.thearma.org/

If you want books, well, there has been an explosion of publishing of European fechtbuch recently. My theory is that the disparate groups of re-enactors and historians found each other on the internet and got to work. I'd recommend:

Talhoffer

http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Combat-Fifteenth-Century-Swordfighting-Cl...

The Codex Wallerstein - lots of good armored and unarmored fighting

http://www.amazon.com/Codex-Wallerstein-Fifteenth-Longsword-Wrestling/dp...

Capo Ferro was a fencing master of great influence on the Italian style

http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Rapier-Combat-Ridolfo-Ferro/dp/1853675806

You can also get books by authors like John Clements, but personally I think you're better off going right for the books themselves. Be especially wary of late 19th/early 20th century fencing historians, who often took the view that fencing is the evolutionary endpoint of swordfighting, and that knights et al were mere bashers oin metal suits.

One great secondary source is the excellent Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe by Sydney Anglo. You owe it to yourself to check it out. It's not cheap, but it's a fantastic primer, well-organized, and full of detail and academic rigour.

http://www.amazon.com/Martial-Arts-Renaissance-Europe/dp/0300083521/

I hope that is a good start - start with the Anglo book and the free materials on the ARMA site. From there, any of those Amazon.com links will take you into a mass of "books similar to this" that'll be useful to you. Look for stuff by George Silver, Agrippa, Thibault, Ringeck, and Vadi. Sadly many of these books and the images in them have gone from "free and available ont he net" to "members only" on websites like the ARMA. How one goes about locking down the images and text of a 600-700 year old book as copyrighted material is beyond me. But when I went looking for art specs I found lots of the image sites I had bookmarked had pulled them down.

 And if you subscribe to Pyramid magazine, Volker Bach wrote a nice pair of articles on European martial arts, both ancient and medieval/renaissance era. We got his permission to use these in Martial Arts 4e, and got his help to update them to 4e rules and to reflect recent scholarship.

***

Actually, I have a few nitpicks with the article - GURPS doesn't peg a Two-Handed Sword at 12#, it's 7# in BASIC SET and has been since Man-to-Man. Making Bastard Swords 5# - and especially making them 2-hex reach weapons - probably makes them a better example a lighter two-handed sword than the more typical hand-and-half swords you might find.

Also, I didn't see any examples of Finger Locks being applied against armored folks when I did my research for GURPS Martial Arts. Arm Locks, sure, plenty of those - and some sweeps, reaps, and throws that fit Takedown and Judo Throw pretty well. All great against armor. But fingers? Finger locks are hard against people wearing gloves, and not terribly easy even if you have bare hands. Against any form of armored glove, well, I'd have to see an image in a perod fechtbuch depicting it against an armored foe (and not just grabbing all of the fingers either - that's borderline at best for Finger Lock) before I believe it qualifies.

Hope this helps. It was nice to read the article.

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