Born in the year Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Paulus Hector Mair was a well-to-do civil-servant, martial artist and avid book-collector living in Augsburg, the single liveliest center in Germany for the study and production of martial-arts texts, reflecting the city’s status as one of the Empire’s most important economic and cultural centers. Some ten manuscript Fechtbücher still reside in Augsburg collections (most of these manuscripts were in Mair’s possession at some point), and a number of important sixteenth-century martial-arts authors lived in Augsburg. This creative foment came together in the vast, lavishly-illustrated compendia Mair produced in three different manuscripts, each approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them). Each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. Together, this vast work gives both 16th-century redactions of much earlier works, a snapshot of how the art had evolved over the ensuing generations and how they were viewed by a passionate amateur practitioner, detailed with hundreds of beautiful illustrations of Renaissance arms, armour and clothing,
