Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay

Featuring period drawings and prints of swordplay, this book examines and compares the only three existing Elizabethan fencing manuals written in English before 1600: Giacomo Di Grassi’s His True Arte of Defense (1594), Vincentio Saviolo’s His Practice in Two Bookes (1595), and George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence and Bref Instructions Upon my Paradoxes of Defence (1599).

More than a technical manual on swordplay, this book explores the influence of a new form of vi…