From what I understand, this obsession with differing martial styles that cannot be mixed is largely a modern fabrication, and not one you really see back in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Dobringer talks about there being only one art of the longsword.
I see the fechtbuchs as largely being a matter of, “Okay, there are several things you can do in a fight. Here’s what I personally prefer.” I’d have to look it up, but I think Joachim Meyer explicitly states how every individual fights differently. It reminds me of Bruce Lee’s focus on tailoring martial arts to increase one’s individual strengths and decrease weaknesses, as opposed to relying on a rigid tradition.
The fact that the art presented in the manuscripts is more or less the same across all of them makes this propensity even more egregious.
That’s not to say there weren’t identifiable schools of thought at the time (many German masters explicitly identified themselves as being of “Liechtenauer’s” tradition), but that doesn’t mean there’s a rigid division between Italian and German, “styles.” For one, most of these masters traveled widely and learned from a wide variety of other masters (Fiore himself explicitly stated this was the case for himself, and as I said, there’s strong circumstantial evidence he may have been a student of Liechtenauer), which guarantees a breakdown of strictly regional approaches and conflating them into a single unified art.
And as I noted earlier in the thread, there’s as much variation between the manuscripts of masters of the same nationality (IE, among the German masters) as there are between any given pair of German and Italian masters.
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