Mair includes 130 wrestling sequences, making this section almost as substantial as the longsword. The first 77 illustrated sequences are based on images in Fabian von Auerswald’s printed wrestling treatise of 1539; the rest from a variety of sources. Appended to the illustrated sequences is a composite treatise containing teachings from the famous 15th century wrestling master Ott and the Baumann Fechtbuch, making this by far the single most complete source of medieval and Renaissance wrestling.
Among these, and indeed among the martial-arts treatises produced by any culture, the massive compendia commissioned by the scholar-swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stands out as uniquely ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript running to approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them) from two-handed sword to rapier, armoured combat to sickle and scythe; each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 lavishly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. The various weapon-forms are mutually integrated with each other in techniques and vocabulary, and collectively offer an enormous volume of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages to the understanding of a physical practice, and Mair is unique among the German masters in systematically giving instructions to both combatants, so that as one learns how to perform a technique, they also learn how to counter it.
Lastly, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as something of a Rosetta stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts.
In this series, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally seminal Fechtbücher of Joachim Meyer and Hans Lecküchner has compiled a team of translator-practitioners to tackle Mair’s opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica (Treatise on the Martial Arts) presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation.
Born in the year Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Paulus Hector Mair was a well-to-do civil-servant, martial artist and avid book-collector living in Augsburg, the single liveliest center in Germany for the study and production of martial-arts texts, reflecting the city’s status as one of the Empire’s most important economic and cultural centers. Some ten manuscript Fechtbücher still reside in Augsburg collections (most of these manuscripts were in Mair’s possession at some point), and a number of important sixteenth-century martial-arts authors lived in Augsburg. This creative foment came together in the vast, lavishly-illustrated compendia Mair produced in three different manuscripts, each approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them). Each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. Together, this vast work gives both 16th-century redactions of much earlier works, a snapshot of how the art had evolved over the ensuing generations and how they were viewed by a passionate amateur practitioner, detailed with hundreds of beautiful illustrations of Renaissance arms, armour and clothing,
