His martial lineage is unknown, but his writings make it clear that he had some connection to the tradition of Johannes Liechtenauer, the grand master of a well-known Medieval German school of fencing.

The fencing manual portion is largely text-less and it may have been designed as a visual aid for use in teaching; in addition to these illustrations, it also contains an astrological treatise and a version of Konrad Kyeser's famous war book Bellifortis.

[4] He seems to have passed through Emerkingen later in the 1450s, where he was contracted to train the brothers David and Buppellin vom Stain; he also produced the Ms. 78.A.15 for them, a significantly expanded version of the Königsegg manuscript.

The presence of the Lion of St. Mark in Talhoffer's 1459 coat of arms (right) has given rise to speculation that he may have been an early member or even a founder of the Frankfurt-am-Main-based Marxbrüder fencing guild, though there is no record of their existence prior to 1474.

[citation needed] Additionally, much has been made of the fact that Talhoffer's name doesn't appear in Paulus Kal's list of members of the Society of Liechtenauer.

Talhoffer's writings exist in well over a dozen manuscripts created in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries; they have also been published a number of times beginning in 1893, including translations into English and French.