You've got to make it thrilling, but you also need to make it convincing. Just using the word "chainmail" will make a segment of the adventure-loving populace drop you with a groan (it's mail or it's chain armor). Cutting someone in twain with a rapier just won't work. How does your middle-sized protagonist take out that giant guard with nothing but bare hands? You'll also find the high-tech way to increase the local entropy slide, with the weapons of mass destruction of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

• Fighting Fit: The Israel Defense Forces Guide to Physical Fitness and Self-Defense
  Col. David Ben-Asher, Perigee Books, NY, 1983.
  

  Well illustrated in photos, even if you mind the space spent on exercise and obstacle courses, the down-and-dirty fighting techniques are excellent. Notable for a section on how a woman who has to hitchhike can defend herself from a driver. Includes defense against knives, clubs, and guns, which will help your character get out of a jam realistically.

• Military Manual of Self Defense: A Complete Guide to Hand-to-Hand Combat
  Anthony B. Herbert, Lt. Col. US Army (Ret); Hippocrene Books, NY, 1984. List price $9.95 and less.
  

  Done like many a military manual, with minimal verbiage, which is okay when it goes with a class. This doesn't, but you can figure out the basics. Covers both unarmed combat and hand weapons like knife, stick, bayonet, and many expedient weapons. Very good for the descriptions of what happens to an opponent when struck. The illustrations are a bit crude but usually clear enough. Also covers how to hold a prisoner for a search and how to securely tie someone.

• Heroic Fantasy
  Edited by Gerald W. Page & Hank Reinhardt; DAW Books, 1979.
  

  The stories are great, but what really counts are the two essays by Reinhardt on armor and swords. Hank bailed out of the SCA because it didn't allow for enough real re-creation, and is now the head of Museum Replicas and Atlanta Cutlery, providing fine reproduction arms and totally workable fantasy ones.

• Attitude: Commonsense Defense for Women
  Lisa Sliwa, Crown Publishers, NY, 1986.
  

  By a woman for women. Okay, so she's one of the tougher Guardian Angels with all sorts of belts. She's also nearly been raped despite this, and her techniques can be used by anyone in moderate condition with her wits about her. These can apply in any culture. If your female characters are cream-puffs unable to defend themselves, this is just as much your choice about them as their looks: it is not an inevitable result of being a woman up against a man.

If you are set on educating yourself in antique fencing styles, the following site lists a tremendous number of fencing manuals published from the Renaissance forward.

Historic Fencing Manuals

However, you do not order online: you make up a list and mail it in with your check.