Hidden among the stacks of a New York City book dealer, its existence unknown to even the most erudite scholars, the Codex Amberger was lost to history until its chance discovery in 2005. Originally thought to have been created by Albrecht Dürer, now attributed to the sphere of the Augsburg patrician Paulus Hector Mair, it may have been part of a much larger treatise whose remnants are yet to be found….

The manuscript may be slender in size and sparse in its written instructions. But its magnificent color illustrations place it among the most opulently illustrated books ever created on the ancient European fighting arts.

For over a decade, fencing historians Dierk Hagedorn and J. Christoph Amberger struggled to find the best way of making it available to both expert and amateur connoisseurs of the old German fight books. This edition represents the first time the complete Codex Amberger appears in print.

In addition to the full-size reproductions of its glorious images, it provides a complete concordance of the depicted techniques compiled from nine contemporary sources that locate the codex in its rightful place among the better-known historical treatises. The instructional texts are rendered in the original old German, Latin, and Walloon and painstakingly translated into both modern German and English.