Rating: 
Summary: Many fascinating but confusing pictures
Review: This book is full of wonderful pictures depicting fighting techniques both unarmed and armed with sword, shields, lucerne hammers, and more. Brief captions accompany each picture but give just a hint about what is happening in the picture. Even with this help it is often unclear. As author notes, most pictures stand alone yet would have benefited from an idea of what combat maneuvers came before and after each picture. So it is often difficult or impossible to visualize what is happening in each picture.Author's opening remarks are fascinating and the best part of the book but are all too brief. More skilled text is included as chapter notes but I found it clumsy to flip back and forth while viewing diagrams. Still, this was an illuminating book about european martial arts (I guess it really couldn't fail to be because I know little about the topic). I would have enjoyed even more explanations by the author, placed with the diagrams rather than the back of the book. I recommend leafing through this one before purchasing. I was able to get what I wanted from it in an hour or so. There is little to read in this book and the diagrams give the untrained eye little to study. Judging from the previous positive reviews by professional swordsman types, it seems apparent that this is a book more suited for the expert than those who are simply curious about medieval combat.
Rating: 
Summary: neat but know what to expect
Review: This book should be very interesting and of value to those who do recreational fighting or stage fighting but less to those who want to read more about it and get more discussion of what all the plates show happening. I think much more explanation (or plain speculation) would have made this book more accessible to a wider audience.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the most important medieval fencing treatises
Review: Two people are to be thanked for this fine book, Mark Rector, the translator and Hans Talhoffer, the medieval fencing master whose work is shown here for the first time in English. Talhoffer's fechtbuch is primarily an illustrated work and much interpretation still needs to be done on his combat system. I have personally used this translation in the preparation of a paper on medieval sword and shield techniques. Talhoffer presents a section on the use of an odd shaped shield in judicial duels, giving us our only substantial material on medieval sword and shield combat. An exhaustive examination of medieval illustrations reveals the positions shown in Talhoffer shown over and over. This suggests that despite his strange shield, what Talhoffer was showing in the mid 15th century was nothing new. This book is useful to people who wish to interpret medieval combat. It contains some editorial comment on the techniques, but this is minimal. Readers should not expect a how-to guide. This is an original fencing treatise, faithfully reproduced. Furthermore the original work was pitched at a fairly advanced level, so don't expect to see the basics. Medieval Combat would work very well in conjunction with Christian Tobler's Secrets of German Medieval Swordsmanship. That book is a translation and interpretation of another treatise from the same tradition. Anyone who reads Tobler and wants more should buy Medieval Combat. Anyone who reads Medieval Combat and finds themselves confused, should buy Tobler's book to give themselves a solid grounding in German medieval swordsmanship.
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