[Greg Mele]

Tom Leoni is well-known in the Western Martial Arts community as a researcher and translator of Renaissance Italian fencing texts. His The Art of Dueling (2005) brought the magnum opus of the famed 17th century sword-master, Salvatore Fabris to an English-language audience for the first time. Now out of print, used copies are eagerly sought, often commanding ridiculously high prices on Ebay or ABEBooks.

Before joining Freelance, in 2009 Tom had self-published a modest little book - a translation of the earliest known work on Italian martial arts, the renowned ]il Fior di Battaglia (The Flower of Battle) by Fiore dei Liberi. This translation quickly became the seminal translation in the WMA community, and forms the basis of study in Robert Charrette's Fiore dei Liberi's Armizare: The chivalric martial arts system of il Fior di Battaglia. In the ensuing three years, Tom has substantially reanalyzed, revised and expanded his translation. We sat down with him at the SCA's Pennsic War to ask him how a staunch student of the Italian rapier found himself suddenly immersed in a study of the two-handed sword, wrestling, pollaxe and mounted combat, and why creating a second edition became an obsession.

Fiore de' Liber: il Fior di Battaglia, 2nd Edition http://www.freelanceacademypress.com/FiorDiBattaglia.aspx is available exclusively from Freelance Academy Press! Buy it direct, and receive an added bonus: we'll email you a PDF containing an annotated translation by of the closely related Morgan Ms, correlated as a correspondence to the Getty Ms and red-lined to make it easy to spot the differences, additions or deletions of text.

You can also find an extensive interview with Tom where he talks about about translating Fiore, why he create this second edition, how he sees Fiore "stack up" compared to the famed rapier treatises of the late Italian Renaissance, and a few of the "memes" about the work he'd really like to see die an ignominious death on the Freelance blog! http://freelanceacademypress.wordpress.com/20...of-battle/!