The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. As a whole, the weapon is shown to be at once far more mundane, and yet just as special, as we imagine it. The book also considers how our modern attempts to reconstruct medieval swordsmanship on screen, and in re-enactment and Historical European Martial Arts (or HEMA), shape, and have been shaped by, our preconceptions of the sword. In doing so, it reveals a far less familiar culture of swordsmanship, beyond the elite, in which swordplay was an entertainment, taught in the fencing school by masters such as Lichtenauer, Talhoffer, and Fiore, and codified in fencing manuals, or fechtbücher. It looks at the practicalities of the sword, including its production, as well as challenging our preconceptions about when and where it was used. Encompassing swords both real and imagined, physical, and in art and literature, it shows them as a powerful symbol of authority and legitimacy. This wide-ranging book uncovers the breadth of the sword's place within the culture of high medieval Europe. Yet this beauty belies a bloody function, for it is also a weapon that appears crude and brutal, requiring great strength to wield: cleaving armour, flesh, and bone. A thing of beauty, its blade flashes in the sun, and its hilt gleams with opulent decoration. It is Roland's Durendal, Arthur's Excalibur, Aragorn's Narsil. ![]() We see the sword as an object of nobility and status, a mystical artefact, imbued with power and symbolism. It should be on the bookshelf of anybody who claims to be interested in the importance of the sword in medieval life and thought and their cultural significance in the past - and present. This study takes the sword beyond its functional role as a tool for killing, considering it as a cultural artefact, and the broader meaning and significance it had to its bearer. ![]() The sword is an important and multi-faceted symbol of military power, royal and communal authority, religion and mysticism.
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