[Museum-level rarity] German fencing incunabula. Johannes Lichtenauer. Zettel.

[Museum-level rarity] German fencing incunabula. Johannes Lichtenauer. Zettel.
Cologne, 1500 B - K 3 (70 pages). The whole book is printed from an engraved board. Restoration of pages, owner's binding (14.2 x 20 cm), age-related contamination. One sheet was torn out. Not a set, the instance starts with a block of pages B.

Johannes Lichtenauer (Hans Lichtenauer, Lichtnauer) was a 15th-century German fencing master. There are currently no direct records of his life or teachings, and everything we know about both is taken from the writings of other masters and scholars. The only account of his life was written by an anonymous author of "Pol Hausbuch", one of the oldest texts, who says that "Master Lichtenauer studied and mastered art thoroughly and legitimately, but he did not invent and put together this art (as has just been said).. Instead, he traveled and searched in many countries with the desire to study and master this legitimate and true art." He may have been alive at the time of the creation of the treatise on fencing contained in the Pol Hausbuch, since this source is the only one that does not accompany his name with a blessing for the dead.

Many later masters described Lichtenauer as a "high master" or "grand master" of art, and these masters usually attribute to him a long poem called "Zettel". Later masters of the tradition often wrote extensive glosses (commentaries) on this poem, using it to structure their own martial teachings. The influence of Lichtenauer on the German fencing tradition as we understand it now is almost impossible to overestimate. The masters from the list of the Lichtenauer Brotherhood compiled by Paulus Kahl were responsible for most of the most significant fencing manuals of the 15th century, and Lichtenauer and his teachings were also the focus of German fencing guilds that emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries, including Marxbrüder and Veiterfechter.

Lichtenauer's teaching is set forth in a small poem called The Narrative (Zettel). These "mysterious, secret words" were deliberately encrypted, probably so that an uninitiated person could not study the techniques outlined in the Narrative. The poetic form also facilitates the memorization of information for those who realize the full significance of this teaching. The narrative formed the basis of the study of the art of fencing for students, and masters such as Sigmund Shining ein Ringeck, Peter von Danzig from Ingolstadt and Yud Lev wrote explanatory comments in order to make the teaching more understandable and detailed.

There are 21 manuscripts containing the Narrative in its original form and many more versions in other manuscripts with comments and explanations. The longest discovered version of the Narrative is presented in the Nuremberg Ms. 3227a and contains twice as many verses as in the others. However, considering that the comments to the poem most often contain repetitions of information from the original Narrative or are written in a fundamentally different style than the text of Lichtenauer, they are all regarded as additions and separate works rather than as part of the main Narrative.