Amazon.com description: Product Description: The rich corpus of medieval German fighting manuals has been used by Western martial artists as a basis for the reconstruction of a European martial art that persisted for nearly three centuries. Building upon the German 'fechtbucher' (fighting manuals) with modern training methodology, Gregory Mele and the Chicago Swordplay Guild present, for the first time, a systematic approach to the study of this powerful fighting tradition. Mele, the founder of the Guild and the Swordplay Symposium International (SSI), provides a clear presentation equally valuable for practitioners of both Eastern and Western martial arts in all their forms, students of medieval history, and arms and armourenthusiasts.