Review of Guy Windsor's "The Art of Sword Fighting In Earnest: Philippo Vadi's 'De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi," Part 3 - The Windsor Gloss

 Last time, I discussed Windsor's translation of Vadi's verses.  This time, it's about Windsor's commentary on Vadi's verses.  This is going to be primarily a "Windsor" versus a "Vadi," though it's going to include thoughts on why Vadi's system evolved the way it did from Fiore's.

First, let's talk about what Windsor has always done well.  He's very good at taking plays from a manual and turning them first into plausible explanations, then into drills to train those plausible explanations.  I've had arguments about whether Windsor is a professional swordsman, or a professional sword teacher; I think the fact that he's able to reconstruct a reasonable interpretation and turn it into a trainable activity means he's probably both.  The best parts of Windsor's gloss on Vadi are all how he interprets a play, and how he turns that play into a drill.  He does this a number of times, and I've run Windsor's drills often enough that I have a pretty good idea that his method works, how it works, and how to tune a drill for skill levels.

This was a little bit harder on this particular book, because I wasn't writing in the middle of pandemic shutdown, so much of my time was committed to other activities, not least of which was a gout flare that laid me up for a week, during which time I could read but not fight.  It also slowed down my processing considerably, because a critical part of any gloss is being able to take the commentary on the original writings and turn it into action.  Given that despite Joachim Meyer's best efforts, there's no such thing as a "complete" fechtbuch - that is, a book that includes every possible movement and contingency - glosses and commentaries serve a key function in providing us an extra layer of understanding, and the layer that has to be built atop that is actual practice.  Being largely unable to test Windsor's interpretation of Vadi means that I'm relying on previous experience with Windsor, rather than direct experience.

That said, Windsor raises a point regarding Vadi as an evolution of Fiore's system - that Vadi spends a lot more time talking about fighting from mezza spada, or half sword, than Fiore.  I'm not certain I agree with his interpretation of why, though I think he has part of that.  Windsor's theory is that sword design evolved, and that half-sword range and grappling range quit being more or less fully overlapped, so that the fight from the half-sword, and the armed grapple, become two separate fights.  There's a good deal of support for this; swords are between four and six inches longer between Fiore's writing in the 1400-1410s and Vadi's in the 1480s.  So far, I think Windsor is on the right track.  However, there's a line of reasoning that he's missing.  Vadi is writing 70 years later, and in many places is stealing directly from Fiore; we know that Fiore was almost certainly a successful captain, fencing instructor, and knight in his own right - otherwise why hire him to tutor you to fight Boucicaut? You hire the best coach you can find for that kind of fight! - and Vadi represents what was probably a pretty typical strain in north-Italian swordsmanship of the 1480s.  The evolution of the school meant that plays that were revolutionary in the 1410s, such as Fiore's zogho stretto, close-in play from the half-sword, is now commonplace and expected.  Thus, it should hardly be a surprise that Vadi spends a lot less time on covering what Fiore does well - grappling, dagger, zogho largo, et cetera - and a lot more time on what Fiore covers in less depth - half-sword play and zogho stretto.  Of Vadi's sword plays, only a handful are from zogho largo.  Most of them require being close enough to lay hands on your opponent's blade, and the majority require you be close enough to lay hands on their person.  We owe Windsor a debt for pointing this out.

We owe Windsor, and those like him, a debt in at least one other way.  They serve as guides or signposts for how to interpret a manuscript - there is nothing inherent in the illustrations, for instance, that says that by convention they illustrate the starting point of a play.  They could just as easily illustrate the midpoint or the end.  Indeed, in order to teach from a fechtbuch, it would be easiest if they did illustrate beginning, middle, and end of a play, but instead what we get, by convention, is the start point or the climactic point, and we have to rely on the text to tell us either what to do from here, or what to do to get here.  Fiore is good in that respect because of his system of marking masters and scholars, and laying out all of them on the same page of a folio.  Vadi, because he only has two illustrations per facing, does a less-effective version of this.  Windsor, meanwhile, is easily at his most entertaining when he, too, is as lost as the rest of us:

F39R
This technique appears to be a defence against someone grabbing you in a headlock and murdering you with his dagger.  The defence appears to be, simply, "stand up".

This is also the point in the book where Windsor reminds me most of Fiore.  Near the end of the Getty manuscript, Fiore starts getting cranky and impatient with his own book.  There's this clear "come on, I can't believe you haven't learned this already!" By the end of Vadi's "miscellaneous plays," which is the last section of the manuscript, Windsor is very clearly doing the same.  The snarky "stand up" above, which is very much what the folio volume looks like it's indicating, is pretty typical of this last section.

In summary, if you found Windsor's interpretations of Fiore to be convincing, and I generally did, you'll probably find his interpretations of Vadi equally convincing.  The book would benefit from having copies of the plays, especially so you could see things like "yeah, it really does just look like 'stand up.'"  It is still an excellent resource for longsword and greatsword training, and gives much more information on zogho stretto than Fiore, our first and best resource for how Italians fought in the 1400s.  I'd recommend it as an addition to any swordsman's bookshelf, even well outside your tradition - I found things in Vadi that made sense of plays from Figueyredo, for instance.  Windsor's gloss specifically is worth adding to any training program for his ability to take a medieval manuscript and turn it into understandable language.