As the bookstore is offline at the moment and the search function did not yield any results, I would like to know if this book is a good starting point for learning swrodsmanship techniques.

There are many, much better books. I'd suggest The Swordsman's Companion, by Guy Windsor,for Italian style, and anything by Christian Tobler for German style.
mark

Skip this book. It is pretty much rubbish. I read this book because of the sword and shield section and it truely is horrible. The SCA that he rails against so much through out the book has a much better understanding of using a shield then Clements does by a pretty big margin. If you are interested in shield use, look for books on highland sword and targe. Dave Teague has a pretty good resource put together for that actually. The lnngsword section isn´t much better....

Hello All!

Paul... there are quite of few of us that bought that book when it first came out years ago.

For some of us it started us down the road to our current studies and for that I'd like to thank John Clements. I owned it at one time. However, it is extremely outdated and filled with techniques that are no longer used in WMA ( even by JC & ARMA) so I'd pass on the purchase and look to a newer book to start your studies.

I agree with Mark on "The Swordsman's Companion" by Guy Windsor for Italian style and "Fighting with the German Longsword" by Christian Tobler if longsword is your interest ,but just like John Clements' work... both books show the authors' interpretation at the time the books were published and not their current teaching.

Still either book would give you a solid foundation in that style and an understanding of the techniques and tactics taught in either system. Then getting to train with either instructor at an WMA event is the way to adjust your core knowledge with the current interpretation. This works for me as I'm one of Christian's long distance students (while Mark favors the Italian style and has been known to take classes from Guy ;) ).

P. Cha! Glad you like my T.Page class notes.

Cheers,

DT

Thanks for the advice everyone. Thankfully I hadn't purchased the book, I have got it out of the local library as it is the only book they had on the subject. My first area of interest is sword and shield so any advice on the best book to start learning this would be much appreciated.

The trouble is that there really isn´t very much on sword and shield. The SCA has a good pressure tested system but it has some pretty big flaws in my opinion...mainly due to the safety rules, but not all of it is. Highland sword and targe is probably the best way to start as I mentioned...and some I.33 techniques can be translated into sword and shield but really, the best you can do it try it all and extrapolate what you can.

I´m not so sure about doing longsword first. While longsword and sword and buckler has a good chunk of similarities, once you start going to actual shields, it changes somewhat...and once you start using the really large shields, the differences is a chasm. I mean you could use it to learn the basics of a fight, but we have to be honest here, a heater shield that covers 60+% of the body is gonna change the game significantly. Also if your using a shield, your using armor...and not the armor you would be using during times of the longsword manuals we have surviving today...and that changes things quite a bit as well. So all one can do at this time is to try and make a best guess at it.