Hi, I'm Guy. Welcome!

I am a consulting swordsman, teacher, and writer.

I research and teach medieval and Renaissance Italian swordsmanship (I have a PhD in recreating historical martial arts), blog about it, write books about it, have developed a card game to teach it (which involved founding another company, and crowdfunding), and run Swordschool.

And as if that wasn't enough, you can even contact me here.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Guy Windsor with swords.

Latest Blog Posts

It’s an exiting time this week. We have a brand-new book out today, and, as it’s my birthday on Saturday (I'll be 51), we’re also running a birthday sale on all ebooksaudiobooks, and online courses. Hurrah! Just use the code GUYSBIRTHDAY30 to get 30% off at checkout (code is valid for all digital products- not print books or t-shirts).

First up, the new book:

 

I have completed my translation of Fiore’s Il Fior di Battaglia, as found in the Getty manuscript. You may recall I produced an affordable facsimile of the Getty a few years ago. Well, we’ve now produced an updated version, that reproduces the Getty manuscript in its entirety, in full colour, and as close as possible to the size of the original. But there’s a twist:

The second half of this volume is a second reproduction of the manuscript with the original Italian text replaced by my English translation. This recreates the experience of reading the original Italian as closely as possible. The book also includes an introduction to Fiore and his life and times, the provenance of the manuscript, and suggestions for further study.

This way, you get the original, and the translation, in one volume… for the same price as the original facsimile-only edition. Because we can. And it’s my birthday.

The excellent Katie Mackenzie has done a gorgeous job on the cover and layout:

A page from the translation laid out on the facsimile
Sample page from part 2

The translation section includes tags on the pages so you can find the section you want from the page edges. You can find it here:

Glorious Getty!

I don’t know if the book will get to you in time for Christmas- much depends on how busy the printer is, and the shipping options you select at checkout. But we’ve done our best to get it out fast enough that there’s a fair chance…

You can also get an audiobook of me reading my translation (remember to use your discount code!) here.

This birthday sale will end on Tuesday December 3rd, so timing is everything…

The code: GUYSBIRTHDAY30

Ebooks and audiobooks: https://swordschool.shop

Courses: https://courses.swordschool.com

Making friends with a taco stand chef

You may recall that my recent trip to Mexico blew me away. What a country, what people.

And yes, what food.

I’ve had lots of “Mexican” food before: some awesome, some so-so. But nothing prepared me for the breadth and depth of the Mexican food experience. I ate everywhere from people’s homes, to roadside shacks, to decent restaurants, and it was all excellent. I’ll kick off this post with some basic traveller advice on not getting sick while travelling to such places, then just go through the dishes I experienced in order. With photos!

Traveller’s Tips

1. Do not drink the tap water. At all, ever. I’d recommend brushing your teeth in filtered water, and hold a mouthful of filtered water in your mouth when having a shower, to prevent you accidentally swallowing anything. Spit it out when you’re done in the shower.

2. Suero. This is a mix of rehydration salts that you can get at any pharmacy. Mix a packet in with a litre of filtered water to rehydrate if you do get sick. Throw away any undrunk mixture after 24 hours.

3. Probiotics. Much of the intestinal distress associated with travelling to Mexico comes from a fight between your existing gut biome, and the bacteria you’re exposed to while you’re there. They are not friends, and those Mexicans fight dirty. So start taking probiotics before you go, and keep taking them while you’re there, whether you feel well or not. I’m quite impressed with the Enterogermina ampoules that I got in Mexico, and with the Probio 7 50+ that I got when I got home.

For thoughts on managing jet lag, see here.

Rusa, or agua minerale preparada

This is just a glass of mineral water, with lime juice, and salt around the rim of the glass. Putting the salt round the glass like that means you can take as much or as little of it as you want/need. And the lime juice is great for vitamin C and digestion. Honestly, why drink plain water ever again? It's available just about everywhere, and superb for keeping you hydrated- much better than plain water would be. I failed to take a photo of it, sorry.

Enmoladas

a dish of enmoladas, covered in mole sauce, with white stuff on top. Classic Mexican food.

My first meal in Mexico was breakfast enmoladas. These were stunningly good. They look like a dessert, but they’re not. They are tortillas stuffed with chicken, in a mole, which is based on cocoa, but is not what most people think of as chocolate. It’s a bit spicy, a bit savoury, a bit umami, a thousand percent delicious. This was served with coffee and carrot juice.

Pozole

a bowl of pozole, an orange soup/stew with vegetables on top. Food from the Aztecs!

This is a traditional Aztec dish, a kind of spicy stew. They have changed one major ingredient though. It used to be made with the flesh of your enemies, but is now made with pork. It’s one of those classic dishes which get fought over- which part of Mexico has the best pozole? I couldn’t possibly say- I had it a couple of times, and they were differently fabulous. Pairs well with a dark Modelo.

Chile en Nogada

a chile en nogada, red white and green.

This dish is only available for a short time each year, which happens to coincide with Mexican independence day (September 16th). The red, white, and green of the dish represent the colours on the Mexican flag. The large poblano chile is stuffed with meat and fruit, and covered in the white walnut sauce. It’s another somewhat sweet, somewhat umami, utterly divine dish.

Elote

Elote with friends Ana and Leon

Mexican cuisine is based on corn the way European cuisine is based on wheat. It’s everywhere, and sometimes it’s just on its own, boiled or grilled over charcoal from a roadside cart, late at night, with friends. I had the version with chilli powder and lime. My lips stung for ages, but it was totally worth it.

Barbacoa

This is not barbecue, as in meat grilled over charcoal or smoked. This is meat that it soft and juicy and tender from being roasted in a pit in the ground, much like a Hawaian imu. You can also do it in the oven. I failed to take a picture because I was too busy eating it.

Tetelas con chapulines

tetelas con chapulines, triangular tortillas stuffed with crickets

This is a Oaxacan delicacy. A tetela is a triangular folded tortilla, stuffed with food. In this case, crickets. They are slightly spicy, quite umami, and delicious. I also had tetelas stuffed with tasajo (a kind of dried meat), and huitlacoche, which is a mushroom that only grows on corn.

I didn’t take pictures of the quesadillas con carnitas, nor the rose-petal flavoured ice-cream. Nor so many other culinary delights. And, let the record state, the only time I did actually get sick was after eating at a place that specialised in American-style food (it was open and close by, no other reason to go there).

It’s funny to think that Mexican food outside Mexico is mostly tacos and burritos. Which is like Italian food outside Italy being mostly pizza and pasta. Yes, there’s a lot of both in Italy, but they are just the tip of a gastronomic iceberg. Just so with Mexico. While there is a lot of pork involved, there is also a huge tradition of vegetarian food (such as the tetelas con huitlacoche). And yes there’s a lot of corn there too, but not in the chiles en nogada.

This is supposed to be a review of the Panoplía Iberoamericana, which I attended over the weekend, teaching several workshops. The event was excellent, a complete delight to attend and teach at. But my hosts here have gone the extra thousand miles to show me the best of their city and culture, and the only way I can think to keep things straight is to just take it in order.

I’ll skip over the food entirely, because it deserves and will get its own separate post. Let me just say that Mexican food outside Mexico can be fabulous, but the sheer breadth of dishes that I’d never even heard of but which blew me away makes me think that I don’t know Mexican food at all. Pozole. Chile en Nogado. Tetelas de Chapolines. And on and on.

I’m writing this in a slight lull in what has been a whirlwind few days. I arrived in Mexico City last Wednesday night, and spent Thursday visiting (after a breakfast of enmoladas, oh my goddess) an extraordinary presidential private collection of guns and other weapons (no photos allowed), and the utterly stupendous Anthropological Museum. I had no idea of the complexity of pre-conquista Mexican cultures. We think of the Aztecs and the Mayans, but honestly that’s like tacos and burritos. The most famous of a very broad range. It would take a week or more to properly absorb this museum, so I’ll stick with two highlights.

The stunning Sun Stone:

This thing is huge- so big that you could put it on the ground and have a sword fight on it. Which is apparently what it was used for! Sacrificial gladiatorial combat. It’s so much a part of Mexican identity that it’s on the 10 peso coin.

And I had no idea about the Codices of the Mixtec people (or even that the Mixtecs themselves existed). These are folded-up parchment documents that have a kind of pictographic writing on them. Sadly no fighting manuals, but a written record of aspects of their culture.

one of the Mixtec codices

The Panoplía Itself

The Panoplia began on Friday, and I did my usual thing of talking to lots of people, working with anyone who asked on whatever they were interested in, signing a lot of books (hurrah!), and I also led a discussion on balancing academic rigour with fencing skill. In other words, balancing knowledge, and skill development. It’s something I think every historical fencer should think about, and decide for themselves where they want to focus. There is room in the Art for pure academics, and pure competitive fencers. And pure “train to win real swordfights”. Most of us lie somewhere in the middle.

Saturday began for me with an impromptu bit of smallsword with Neuro, Arturo, and Leon. It started with me showing them some stuff from Angelo, and ended with a very friendly bit of light fencing. Which set me up perfectly for my longsword mechanics class. It was rather full (about double the signed-up students actually attended). My goal with mechanics classes is to get everyone moving better than they were before, and to generate at least one significant ‘aha!’ moment. I think we managed it. (I’m still waiting for the class photos- if you took one, please send it to me!)

After lunch (oh my goddess) I had my Capoferro rapier mechanics class, which was a bit smaller, and started with everyone present, so it was easier to build the experience for the students. I saw many, many, eyes flashing wide as something tiny and apparently trivial made all the difference in how the sword functioned. It was extremely satisfying!

This was followed by the official event party, which was held in the Hacienda de Cortes.

I mean, really.

I was a bit of a party pooper, going home at about 1.30am. And on Sunday morning my hosts and I were (we thought) a bit early getting to the event. It was the free-fencing not-tournament process that the event’s godfather Pedro Velasco uses (which you may recall from the Panoplia Iberica, in December 2023). But it turns out that after an evening of Mezcal, beer, wine (thanks again, Carlos!) these folk were hard at it in the sunshine:

Personally, I needed a bit of maintenance so I found a quiet shady spot and did some physio, stretching, breathing form, and push-ups. I then got chatting to a group lead by one of the instructors (Gaute Raigorodsky) about Fiore mechanics. At one point I said ‘get some swords, let’s try it’ which inevitably lead to an hour or so of mechanics training in another shady spot. You can go much deeper with a small group that already know the basics.

And then the Panoplía was over… except for the after-party. Oh my god, the Mezcal!

Post-Panoplía “recovery”

Monday started nice and slow with my lovely hosts Elena and Eduardo taking me to breakfast (which alone deserves a post of its own). Here we are: nice to know that I’m not the only hat wearer! My Mexican sun hat was a gift from my hosts.

(my very witty t-shirt is by the excellent Stephan Eichelmann).

After which we went to find the elusive Axolotl in the extraordinary lagoons of Xochimilco.

the lagoons of Xochimilco- jungly venice

And we did!

the axolotl

Then on Tuesday it was off to see one of the wonders of the world: the pyramids of Teotihuacan. Words fail me.

the sun pyramid at Teotihuacan, with Guy Windsor in the foreground

I rounded off Tuesday evening by teaching a Fiore mechanics class for Jorge Chavez and Eduardo Mayeya's club Arthenea. It was rather off-the-cuff: we decided to do it in the car on the way to the pyramids. But I think it was well received.

The organisers of the event (in no particular order), Jorge Chavez, Ana Tavera, Eduardo Mayeya, and Pedro Velasco have done an amazing job putting together the first (and I really hope not the last) of the Mexican edition of the Panoplía, and an even better job of looking after their guests. What a place. What people. Oh my. Muchisimas gracias a todos!

And a final note: if you have photos of my classes from the event, please send them to me to incorporate into this post. Thanks!

At the end of June I went to Kansas… and came back with footage of a whole lot of my interpretation of Fiore’s Il Fior di Battaglia, including all 73 plays of the dagger, and 7 new clips on Fiore’s footwork. These are now available with the re-edited and re-released Medieval Dagger Course.

Dagger Course Info

For the next ten days, you can get 40% off with this link: Click here for Dagger Course

Or use the code DAGGERLAUNCH2024 at checkout. Feel free to share the link, the code, and this post with your friends.

If you already own the old course you can get the new one for just $70 with a different link, please drop me an email and I'll send it to you. I tried to do that with a bulk email a while ago, and a) most people didn't get it and b) the link stopped working.

Fiore’s dagger plays comprise by far the largest single section of the manuscript, so there is a lot of new material, all organised according to where you’ll find it in the treatise. I’ve also included all the plays that include a dagger in any form, so, the defence of the dagger against the sword, the defence of the sword in the scabbard against the dagger, and even the dagger and the staff defending against a spear.

Veterans of my mailing list will know that when launching a new course, I have to send out a bunch of emails. I will try to make every email worth your time, whether you buy the course or not. To do that I’ll include a link to a piece of the course content, like the one with me throwing stuff at Jessica’s head that I shared last week. For now, the following sections of the course are already free to preview on the sales page:

  • Falling
  • Dagger Handling and Basic Strikes
  • The Nine Masters
  • First Master plays 1 and 2: disarm and counter

This way you can get the idea whether the course is for you, or not.

Browse the full library of Dr. Guy Windsor’s work: books in physical, digital and audio formats, workbooks, and video courses.

Guy frequently keeps his blog updated with thoughts, challenges, interviews and more!

Bio

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live classes

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