by Christian Tobler
At the Pennsic War event this year, I taught a suite of four classes treating the use of the German longsword, dagger, sword and buckler, and, finally – messer. During that final class, someone asked me why the cleric/fencing author Johannes Lecküchner, in his mammoth treatise on the messer, had at once repeated so much of his predecessor Liechtenauer’s verse for the longsword, but had changed the names of most of the signature strokes with the sword, and for all of the guards.
This is the sort of thinking I like to see with this material. Thank you Mr Tobler for thinking about Lechüchner as a writer with an audiance, not just a swordsman.
