I would like to thank Professor Curry for her kind words; to have a scholar such as she praise my work is most gratifying. However, I cannot take full credit for The Knightly Art of Battle, as it was really a group effort. Elizabeth Morrison, curator of manuscripts at the Getty; Greg Britton, the former publisher; and Kurt Hauser, our designer, are at least as responsible as I am for its style and content.
I wrote The Knightly Art of Battle at the Getty's behest in about a week. There was a need in this popular-audience work to limit my foreign-language bibliography, which is why neither Malpiero's book nor that of Rubboli and Cesari is mentioned--although I did manage to slip in Cavina, whose work I think should be more widely known. It is not the book I would have written if we lived in a world designed by Rousseau, but it is a means of testing the scholarly and popular waters for the feasibility of a full translation and study of all four of Fiore dei Liberi's fascinating manuscripts (besides being a painless introduction to medieval warfare for undergraduates). I therefore exhort all those who would be interested in seeing such a work to order a copy of The Knightly Art of Battle for themselves and/or their school libraries.