A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

  Several weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend an all-day class taught by Russ Mitchell and Kat Laurange on Hungarian sabre, which is well outside my usual sword wheelhouse; I tend to focus on two-handed cutting weapons primarily intended for foot combat, whether it's longsword, katana, or Dane-axe.  I consider it fully appropriate to say that class changed how I approach training and teaching.  I picked up the first in the Austro-Hungarian military saber (I'm American, consarn it, and I'll spell saber like George Patton intended it!) series that day, read it within the week, and have been debating how to review it properly since. The reason for the delay is because I needed to separate the experience from the book, and also because there are at least three things that need to be reviewed when reviewing a historic martial arts manual.  The first is the manual as a book; the second is the martial system described as a martial system; the third is the historicit...

  I would love to give this book five stars out of five, but cannot. I found this book promising but deeply frustrating; it is essentially two books, and each of these books is itself a collection of essays rather than a cohesive whole.  The first book is a historiography of Chinese martial arts manuals, discussing the problems of age, the tendency of martial artists to exaggerate the accomplishments of the past, and the Republican Chinese renaissance of martial arts from a generally military field to a more broadly based cultural phenomenon.  This is the half written primarily by Brian Kennedy.  It is not perfect; Kennedy and Guo are very obviously xingyi practitioners and write what they know, and they are both far more familiar with developments in Taiwan than in China as a whole, including Hong Kong, the mainland, and Macau - again, writing what they know, and in the process illustrating the areas that they don't  know and didn't research as heavily. Before ...

As I've said elsewhere, I believe that book reviews should provide what the reader really  needs to know up front, so here it is: I wanted very much to like this book.  The Hatcher and Chidester editions of the Getty and Morgan manuscripts, respectively, are impressive books both as Fiore manuscripts and as works of scholarship.  Unfortunately, the Paris manuscript is easily the most frustrating publicly available edition of Fiore, and that trend continues here. To understand why the Paris manuscript, before translators get involved, is so damn frustrating requires a little bit of explanation.  The Getty, the Morgan, and the Pisani Dossi were all at least made by someone familiar with Fiore's system, almost certainly Fiore himself, and by a series of linked artists - fairly well established in Chidester's edition of the Morgan .  The Paris manuscript, meanwhile, was made by someone who had no idea what the hell they were looking at, but sure liked the fancy draw...

We live in a golden age for the accessibility of historical sword sources for English-language readers.  Take Fiore, for instance.  In addition to Hatcher's excellent version of the Getty manuscript  we have Marsden's translation and interpretation of the Paris manuscript  and this - Michael Chidester's HEMA Bookshelf edition of the Morgan manuscript .  The only known Fiore that doesn't have an English-language release is the privately held Pisani Dossi. Reviews should tell you what you need to know up front, so this is the headline: the Morgan isn't my favorite Fiore manuscript (I think Getty's progression is better for training, and it's more complete), but I think this is probably my favorite of the modern Fiore manuscript editions.  That is a very tight race, but Chidester wins. Chidester is not a Fiore partisan, unlike, say, Windsor , but has a deep western sword background, such that he is the chief editor and director at Wiktenauer .  His backg...

Before I start reviewing the Chidester reproduction of the Morgan manuscript , I'd like to talk about parrying and defense in longsword, based on a passage I read in Meyer.  To do so first requires me to express some frustrations. The frustration is this: Meyer knows what he's talking about, generally, and has some excellent  advice, but Meyer is also writing for gentleman duelists, not for killers, and Meyer has a very bad case of OCD in trying to document every potential combat situation he can think of.  This weakens his overall approach, especially considering that Meyer, writing in a different era from, say, Fiore, relied much more heavily on text than on images.  The number of woodcuts in Meyer, compared to the overall length of his book, is frustratingly small, and the Meyer woodcuts varied even more substantially than the Fiore drawings vary from edition to edition.  This means that to understand Meyer, you really  need either a guide, or a lot ...

  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'...

 Last time, I discussed the front material of Guy Windsor 's revised translation and commentary of Philippo Vadi , The Art of Sword Fighting In Earnest: Philippo Vadi's "De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi."   This time, I will discuss Vadi's work itself, and what it implies about historical sword fighting, especially in the mid-15th Century and in Italy.  Since this post is about Vadi's own words, there should be no confusion of reference here between what Vadi says, and what Windsor says about  Vadi. Vadi's opening remarks are the usual round of self-deprecating self-praise you find in most medieval manuals.  He gives little of his career, which is unfortunate, but his opening remarks also begin a pattern of emphasizing the importance of cleverness and intelligence in fighting, rather than brute strength: As the famous saying goes: cleverness overcomes strength. And what is greater still and almost incredible: the wise rules the stars. An art that conquers all...

 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 lim...

At this point I can safely say I have studied, am studying, or am at least passing-familiar with no fewer than four historical or modern sword schools (in rough order, SCA sword and board, Fiore, shinkage, and montante courtesy of Figueyredo), and am currently working my way through Windsor's translation of Vadi.  This has introduced me to a serious problem - technical vocabulary.  In any profession, technical vocabulary or jargon accrues, but because there are few true modern practitioners of sword work, the technical vocabulary winds up being exceptionally obscure, and cause for argument. We know that this has been a problem for a while, too.  For instance, Fiore trained under a series of Germans and north Italians, which means he would have been familiar with the German technical vocabulary, probably learning the same technical vocabulary developed in Liechtenauer's   Zettel .  The problem, then, is that Fiore wasn't   working  in Germany.  Som...

Last time, I wrote about the   six blows of the sword , based on   di Grassi 's wrist-elbow-shoulder classification.  Other writers classify them based on origin (Fiore, Figuereydo), targeting (Yagyû) or technique (pick a German).  However, di Grassi's classification has a couple of advantages to me - it allows development of exercises to strengthen particular techniques without relying on repeating the technique itself, and the truth is that if you can hit someone in one spot with a technique, you can hit them in another with it.  Its weakness is that it is much easier to train a fighter, for instance, to throw a   mandritto fendente  than to know when in a fight to use the wrist and when to use the shoulder, and that training a fighter to target the head, or to know when to go around the sword rather than try to beat through, is easier to see directly than the blows of wrist, elbow, and shoulder. For all that, though, di Grassi's conception is probab...