num_pages: 262
description: The warriors of medieval Italy practised a complex and complete martial art which included the wielding of sword axe and spear with wrestling knife-fighting and mounted combat. In the waning years of the 14th century Fiore dei Liberi was a famed master of this art whose students included some of the most renowned and dangerous fighting men of his day. Credited by fencing historians as the father of Italian swordmanship toward the end of his life Master Fiore preserved his teachings in a series of illustrated manuscripts four of which have survived to the present day and have become the basis of a worldwide effort to reconstruct this lost martial art. This magnum opus Il Fior di Batalgia (The Flower of Battle) composed in early 1409 is one of the oldest most extensive and most clearly elucidated martial arts treatises from the medieval period.Freelance Academy Press is proud to present Flowers of Battle a multi-volume series of lavishly illustrated hardcover books combining full color facsimiles of the Master's original manuscripts professional annotated translations and extensive peer-reviewed essays.Volume III Florius de Arte Luctandi presents a translation transcription and reproduction of chronologically the last most recently discovered and visually most lush Flower of Battle manuscript. This posthumous work raises more questions than it for whom was the manuscript creared and why? Why was it translated into a complex humanistic Latin and from what prior source? Why are there clear nomenclatures and instruction differences between this and the other three manuscripts and do these changes reflect an evolution in the Master's thinking or errors in transmission? Mondschein and Mele tackle these questions and more in a lavishly illustrated introduction that seeks to set the manuscript in context as an objet d'art as an example of Renaissance patronage and as a practical martial arts memorial.
language: English
title: Flowers of Battle, Volume III: Florius de Arte Luctandi
publisher: Freelance Academy Press