Although he very much operated in the tradition of fencing masters going back to the late fourteenth-century, Johannes Lichtenauer, the German fencing master Joachim Meyer, a knife-maker by trade in the city of Stuttgart, embraced these new ways of learning, producing a diagram now called a ‘Meyer Square’, which allowed fencers to practice attacking the four openings, or target areas, in a series of combinations denoted by numbers. In his 1570 manual, he chose to depict such diagrams pinned to the walls and drawn on the floors of a fencing school, with men practicing using them in order to perfect the form of their fencing technique.
Meyer’s work also shows the range of different styles of combat practiced in this period. Alongside the rapier, he provided instruction in the longsword,…
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Medieval World Culture & Conflict (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 16 - 2025