Search results for ""Author Ken Mondschein""

Understanding the past takes more forms than historiography. Since 2005, professional and amateur scholars have come together at the annual International Medieval Congress in Western Michigan University to discuss the role re-construction, re-enactment and re-creation can play in 'breathing life into these dry bones' to deepen our knowledge of the past. Under the sponsorship of the Higgins Armory Museum and the Oakeshott Institute, presenters have looked at subjects ranging from ore smelting to equitation to the use of recreation and reenactment in the classroom. A special focus of these sessions has always been the critical examination of European fencing books, or Fechtbucher - not only for the sake of reconstructing the arts found therein, but also for what these sources can tell us about intellectual, cultural and social history. Thanks in part to editors' Mondschein and Cramer's work, the study of fencing books has rapidly become a recognized field of academic study. This volume brings together eight papers examining the study and reconstruction of medieval and early modern fight-books and related subjects. The subjects covered range from manuscript studies to philology, from Aristotelian physics to martial musicality, from medieval textuality to women and warfare. It will be of interest not only to professional historians, musicologists, literary scholars and art historians, but also to the vast army of impassioned and enthusiastic practitioners who endeavor, as a labour of love, to make the past come to life.

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The warriors of medieval Italy practised a complex and complete martial art, which included the wielding of sword, axe and spear with wrestling, knife-fighting and mounted combat. In the waning years of the 14th century, Fiore dei Liberi was a famed master of this art, whose students included some of the most renowned and dangerous fighting men of his day. Credited by fencing historians as the father of Italian swordmanship, toward the end of his life, Master Fiore preserved his teachings in a series of illustrated manuscripts, four of which have survived to the present day, and have become the basis of a worldwide effort to reconstruct this lost martial art. This magnum opus, Il Fior di Batalgia (The Flower of Battle), composed in early 1409, is one of the oldest, most extensive, and most clearly elucidated martial arts treatises from the medieval period. Flowers of Battle is a multi-volume series of lavishly illustrated hardcover books, combining full colour facsimiles of the Master's original manuscripts, professional, annotated translations, and extensive peer-reviewed essays. Volume III, Florius de Arte Luctandi, presents a translation, transcription and reproduction of chronologically the last, most recently discovered, and visually most lush Flower of Battle manuscript. This posthumous work raises more questions than it answers: for whom was the manuscript creared and why? Why was it translated into a complex, humanistic Latin, and from what prior source? Why are there clear nomenclatures and instruction differences between this and the other three manuscripts, and do these changes reflect an evolution in the Master's thinking, or errors in transmission? Mondschein and Mele tackle these questions and more in a lavishly illustrated introduction that seeks to set the manuscript in context, as an objet d'art, as an example of Renaissance patronage, and as a practical martial arts memorial. Series Note: Vol. I: Historical Overview and the Getty Manuscript Vol. II: Flos Duellatorum Vol. III: Florius de Arte Luctandi Vol. IV: The Pierpont-Morgan Manuscript and General Concordance Vol. V: Leaves of Battle – Fiore dei Liberi’s Martial Heirs and Influence

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