Consulting Swordsman
Guy Windsor A little while ago I went to the National Fencing Museum to photograph some of Malcolm Fare’s amazing book collection. Most researchers and other interested folk find a compiled pdf of the photos much more useful than the raw footage, not least because the raw footage is not usually in order; for technical reasons, the … Read more
If you stick your head above the parapet, someone will take a shot at it. This is true and always will be. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing, or how well you’re doing it, if enough people see it some of them will hate it. It’s just how people are. But … Read more
I’ve been taking a break from working on The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest: Philippo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatioria Dimicandi (the long-awaited second edition of Veni Vadi Vici), and putting my shoulder to the wheel of getting my Magnum Opus ready: this is the accurately but not very inspiringly titled The Theory and Practice … Read more
The OURA Ring: the future of fitness wearables? One of the challenges of maintaining my fitness since retiring from teaching classes four nights a week is getting reliable feedback. I’ve been looking into heart rate monitors for this purpose, specifically to track recovery times (how long it takes my heart rate to come back to … Read more
Last week I checked Piermarco Terminiello’s translation of Giganti’s Second Book, published in 1608. I took issue with his translation of tirar di punte di piede fermo as “delivering a lunge”. I would render it as ‘thrust with the fixed foot”. This sparked a very useful discussion thread on Facebook, which was far too interesting … Read more
In 2012, Piermarco Terminiello discovered the previously lost Second Book of Nicoletto Giganti in the Howard de Walden collection, which is housed at the Wallace Collection (in my not very humble opinion, one of the top ten museums worldwide, and in the top five for anything sword-related). You may recall my rejoicing when the 1608 … Read more
This is a great week for historical fencing. I spent three full days at the National Fencing Museum with a decent camera and a book-photography rig, taking hi-res images of the cream of their amazing collection of treatises, with the kind assistant of James Hester, and Malcolm Fare (whose collection this is). I have 122 … Read more
This post is a short library of my favourite online resources regarding how medieval manuscripts were created, and related traditional bookbinding videos. One of the unexpected consequences of my return to Phillipo Vadi’s De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi while working on the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici was that I got completely hooked on the physical craft … Read more
Philippo Vadi’s instructions for the size of your sword, in Chapter 2 of his De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, are the earliest example of sword specs in fencing literature. So what is Vadi Sword Geometry? He says (as I translate it in The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest): Chapter II: The Measure of the Two-Handed … Read more
Many students find the (often) foreign terminology a major barrier to learning swordsmanship. I get it. I really do. In 2006 I even wrote an article explaining why I translate “meza” and “tutta” the way I do. I put a glossary in the back of most of my books, and I created a separate pdf … Read more