The Academy of the Sword

The most detailed and comprehensive treatise on swordsmanship ever written. Gerard Thibault’s Academy of the Sword offers an extraordinary glimpse into a forgotten landscape of ideas, in which Pythagorean sacred geometry illuminated the lethal realities of rapier combat to create one of the Western world’s only thoroughly documented esoteric martial arts. Translated by the widely respected occultist and scholar John Michael Greer, this stunningly illustrated and precisely detailed manual of Renaissance swordsmanship is a triumphant document of Renaissance culture―as well as a practical manual of a martial art that can still be studied and practiced today. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Gerard Thibault--poet, physician, architect, painter, occultist, and master swordsman--astonished the courts of Europe with a new system of swordsmanship based on the principles of sacred geometry and Renaissance occult philosophy. [Thibault] set out to put everything he knew about the way of the sword into a single comprehensive textbook of rapier fencing that could be used by students who had no access to a teacher of his system. Originally published in 1630, The Academy of the Sword is that textbook--the most elaborate manual of swordsmanship ever published in any language, packed with hundreds of clearly described and illustrated techniques.-- Adapted from publisher information on back cover