The sword is an important and multi-faceted symbol of military
power, royal and communal authority, religion and mysticism. This
study takes the sword beyond it functional role as a tool for
killing, considering it as a cultural artifact and the broader
meaning and significance it had to its bearer. It should be on the
bookshelf of anybody who claims to be interested in the importance
of the sword in medieval life and thought and their cultural
significance in the past - and present. Robert Woosnam-Savage,
Royal Armouries. We see the sword as an object of nobility and
status, a mystical artefact, imbued with power and symbolism. It is
Roland's Durendal, Arthur's Excalibur, Aragorn's Narsil. A thing of
beauty, its blade flashes in the sun, and its hilt gleams with
opulent decoration. Yet this beauty belies a bloody function, for
it is also a weapon that appears crude and brutal, requiring great
strength to wield: cleaving armour, flesh, and bone. This
wide-ranging book uncovers the breadth of the sword's place within
the culture of high medieval Europe. Encompassing swords both real
and imagined, physical, and in art and literature, it shows them as
a powerful symbol of authority and legitimacy. It looks at the
practicalities of the sword, including its production, as well as
challenging our preconceptions about when and where it was used. In
doing so, it reveals a far less familiar culture of swordsmanship,
beyond the elite, in which swordplay was an entertainment, taught
in the fencing school by masters such as Lichtenauer, Talhoffer,
and Fiore, and codified in fencing manuals, or fechtbücher. The
book also considers how our modern attempts to reconstruct medieval
swordsmanship on screen, and in re-enactment and Historical
European Martial Arts (or HEMA), shape, and have been shaped by,
our preconceptions of the sword. As a whole, the weapon is shown to
be at once far more mundane, and yet just as special, as we imagine
it.
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