THE ART OF HISTORICAL FENCING
About Living Meyer
Living Meyer brings historical fencing, practical training, and research into conversation. The work continues through reading, questioning, practicing, and meeting other fencers.
01 / THE SOURCE
Our name comes from a book. In 1570 the fencing master Joachim Meyer published a treatise on the art of combat: longsword, dusack, rapier, dagger, and staff, illustrated with woodcut plates. Living Meyer studies that book and the tradition around it, and trains the art it describes.
Reading a sixteenth-century manual is only the start. Meaning has to be tested with a sword in hand, with a partner, in a room full of other fencers asking the same questions.
02 / HOW WE WORK
We keep the layers separate. What Meyer wrote. What a named translator made of it. What later scholarship adds. What Living Meyer teaches as its own reading of the text. When those differ, we say so instead of blending them into one confident answer.
That discipline runs through our workshops, our writing, and the Fechter evaluation. It is slower than certainty. It is also how a tradition stays honest.
03 / THE GUILD
Living Meyer Historical Fencing Schools train in their own cities and gather several times a year at fechtschulen: weekends of workshops, lectures, and historical competition, presented together with the Meyer Freifechter Guild.
The guild’s two decades of articles, research, and training material are being reviewed and republished here, piece by piece, each credited to its author.
Articles & Resources →04 / WAYS IN