Cultural History of the Medieval Sword
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A01=Dr Robert W Jones
A01=Robert W Jones
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Author_Dr Robert W Jones
Author_Robert W Jones
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBLC
Category=HBTB
Category=JBCC2
Category=JFCD
Category=NHTB
Category=WCK
COP=United Kingdom
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Durendal
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Excalibur
fechtbucher
Fiore
Historical European Martial Arts
Language_English
Lichtenauer
Medieval Europe
Narsil
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
swordsmanship
Talhoffer
Product details
- ISBN 9781837650361
- Weight: 696g
- Dimensions: 170 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2023
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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The sword is an important and multi-faceted symbol of military power, royal and communal authority, religion and mysticism. 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.
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. Robert Woosnam-Savage, Royal Armouries.
We see the sword as an object of nobility and status, a mystical artefact, imbued with power and symbolism. It is Roland's Durendal, Arthur's Excalibur, Aragorn's Narsil. A thing of beauty, its blade flashes in the sun, and its hilt gleams with opulent decoration. 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.
This wide-ranging book uncovers the breadth of the sword's place within the culture of high medieval Europe. Encompassing swords both real and imagined, physical, and in art and literature, it shows them as a powerful symbol of authority and legitimacy. It looks at the practicalities of the sword, including its production, as well as challenging our preconceptions about when and where it was used. 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. 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. As a whole, the weapon is shown to be at once far more mundane, and yet just as special, as we imagine it.
Robert W. Jones is Alumni Association Coordinator and tutor at Advanced Studies in England, an independent study abroad programme based in Bath, England. He is also a Visiting Scholar in History at Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
