Review of Guy Windsor's "The Art of Sword Fighting In Earnest: Philippo Vadi's 'De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi," Part 1 - Front Material

 After reading From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi, I decided I'd read Guy Windsor's second translation of Philippo Vadi, The Art of Sword Fighting In Earnest: Philippo Vadi's "De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi."  This is a revision of Windsor's earlier Veni, Vadi, Vici, which has the additional effect of making VVV harder to find for comparison.  The book is available in both paperback, for about $30, and hardback, for about $60; I have the paperback.  For convenience's sake, I'll be referring to Windsor's portions, such as the front-end material and the analysis, as Windsor, and the actual text as Vadi.

The Wiktenauer link I gave above to Vadi includes Windsor's translation with the pages.  This is the single biggest flaw in the book - the illustrations are not paired with the text as in the Hatcher or Chidester editions of Fiore.  That is due to the limitations of printing, but it is still unfortunate that the verses lose their context.  Windsor, being the evangelist of swords that he is, has made the entire scanned manual available for download, but that requires a reference outside the text, which limits its training utility.

One could reasonably ask why Guy Windsor.  Windsor was one of the earliest modern practitioners of historical martial arts - defined here as reconstructed from manuscript, as opposed to a living tradition.  Along the way, he learned Renaissance Italian and did sufficient scholarly reconstructive work and commentary that he earned a doctorate for research work as a side effect.  He also has an excellent reputation among the people I know who deal with the historical martial arts world as a stand-up individual and a decent man; that may not seem like an important point, but a man who's given thought to the ethics of sword use, and their wider implications for the rest of his life, is on some level a better swordsman than someone who has not.  Thus, I have generally found Windsor both competent and thoughtful, and find his interpretations plausible, even if we cannot know because there are no lineage descendants of Vadi or Fiore teaching today.

I mention all of this because Windsor's qualifications, and work as a scholar as well as a swordsman, are the single biggest draw of this edition, and Windsor more than makes up for the missing illustrations by a consideration in detail of Vadi's time and place.  He touches on the production costs of a manuscript like Vadi's, with the costs of parchment, professional scribe, and color artist all discussed in detail.  This is important for another reason, this tied back to Fiore.  Today, it is easy to dismiss Fiore as a relative unknown because there is a longer sustained tradition of German longsword fighters; however, there are no fewer than four Fiore manuscripts produced during his lifetime, plus at least two other duplicates in Germany and France, and those manuscripts each represent a substantial labor cost.  To be able to afford the first, he would either have to be rich enough to pay for their production, or a good credit risk to get a loan in the aftermath of the collapse of the Italian financial industry in the late reign of Edward III of England.  This says that in his lifetime, he did not suffer from lack of business.  Vadi, meanwhile, held a number of fairly prestigious, well-paying government positions, and these helped him bankroll his manuscripts, but he also shows signs of being a well-educated man, as he consistently refers to cleverness, not brute force, as how fights are won and lost, and like Fiore, he was comfortable writing in verse to the point that his verses are conversational and vernacular, rather than stilted and formal.

The path between Fiore and Vadi is unclear.  It seems likely that the d'Este family of Ferarra, who owned two copies of Fiore, were the immediate link, and that Fiore's lineage was being taught in northern Italy during this period.  However, there are crucial differences between Vadi's method and Fiore's that indicate that Vadi is a later development - Fiore does not specify the dimensions of a sword but Vadi does repeatedly, for instance, and many of Vadi's plays are written in much more exacting detail than Fiore's "you get the idea" approach.  This at least partly reflects the fact that Fiore was writing for knights in a complete combat system, while by Vadi's time the two-handed sword had largely fallen out of fashion as a battlefield weapon thanks to the rise of plate armor, but was still common for duel and tournament.

All of this is Windsor's general thesis in the front-end material  - that Vadi is clearly a member of Fiore's lineage, but where and how is impossible to establish; that Vadi was sufficiently wealthy to bankroll the making of a manuscript; that Vadi is a thinker, and therefore has clarified many of Fiore's points.  All this, by itself, makes up for the lack of the illustrations.

Next, I will discuss Vadi qua Vadi, going through the verses to talk about what is important and distinctive.  Spoilers - thrusts, blows of the wrist, and a period source for blows from the hips!