Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for June 2017

HEMA geek heaven (especially for rapier fans)

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The original book, the translation, and my notes. Ah, HEMA geek heaven.

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 was discovered, and translated by Piermarco, published as “The ‘Lost' Second Book of Nicoletto Giganti (1608)“. But unfortunately, no images of the original book's text were released so it was impossible to check Piermarco’s work. It’s not that I doubt him, it’s just that I do not trust any translation without being able to check it against the original. I should also point out that his Italian is WAY better than mine.
But still, I have to check.
I came to the Wallace yesterday and photographed the entire book, and intend to make a transcription of it which can be published, and meanwhile work on getting permission from the de Walden trustees to release my photos into the wild. I also spent some time doing an initial check of the translation, and to my complete lack of surprise, can confirm that it is very good.
In my brief survey, I only came across one instance of a term that I think is simply incorrect; on page 2 Giganti wrote “…tirar di punte di piede fermo,” which Piermarco translates (on page 25) as “delivering a lunge”. It is not— it is ‘thrust with the fixed foot”. As you can see on page 7 of the 1628 edition of his first book (from the photographs taken at the National Fencing Museum), Giganti very clearly explains the lunge, and calls it a ’stoccata longa’, and it explicitly includes a step forwards (crescer innanzi).

The lunge, from the first book. Tthis is from the 1628 edition, in the National Museum of Fencing collection.) Click on it for a readable resolution.

The translation does veer towards interpretation in places, such as in these examples:
On page 21r, Giganti wrote this chapter heading: “IL MODO DI ANDAR CONTRA TVTTE LE GVARDIE, E FERIR in più modi mentre che’l nemico caua la Spada” [the CAPS are in the original]
Which Piermarco translates on page 68 as: “THE METHOD OF ADVANCING AGAINST ANY GUARD, AND ATTACKING IN VARIOUS WAYS WHILE YOUR ENEMY DISENGAGES HIS SWORD”
But which I would render as: “The way of going against all the guards, and striking in more ways while the enemy disengages the sword”. [Though I'd probably also use caps where Giganti does.]
Indeed, ‘ferire’ is (in all the cases that I noted) translated as “attack”, which I don’t quite agree with. It means to strike or wound. Sure, in a fencing context you do that by attacking, but my pedantic soul revolts at the liberty.
Likewise on page 47v, Giganti wrote: “NON mi posso immaginar la causa perche il giocar di pugnal solo non sia hoggi giorno in uso.”
Which Piermarco translates on page 129 as: “I cannot fathom why the play of the dagger alone is no longer practised.”
It’s correct, in that it represents the meaning of the text, but I would render it as “I cannot imagine the cause for which the play of the dagger alone is not practised these days.”
Whenever you’re using a translation, it’s good to know how closely it hews to the manner and voice of the author. In rendering Giganti’s words so clearly, Piermarco is helping the modern practitioner access the text, but at the cost of tidying up some of the language.

I've been wanting to do this ever since the translation came out, so can now cross it off my bucket list. Huzzah! I'd like to thank Helen Jones of the Wallace Collection who was very helpful in making the book available. She also told me that the de Walden books are currently being catalogued, and most of them can now be found (as in their catalogue entries, not the texts themselves) online.

A great week for historical fencing.

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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 gigabytes of raw images, that will in due course be processed into a more web-friendly format, and put online for free into the public domain to be used by anyone as they please.

We have Hope: New Method (1707), Fencing Master (1687), and Advice to his Scholar (1729).

We have McBane (1728), Viggiani (1575), Sainct-Didier 1573), De La Touche (1670), Senese (1660).

And we have goddam Thibault (1628).

Plus eighteen other treatises, dating between 1540 and 1838. The ones I am most excited about are Senese, Viggiani, and Alfieri. But having both the 1610 AND the 1629 editions of Capoferro is pretty cool too. Not to mention the marginalia, like this detail from this copy of De La Touche:

And this is only about 10% of the museum’s collection.

There is a huge amount of work to do to crop, order, rotate, enhance, and otherwise process these files, and if anyone with the necessary skills would like to help, please do volunteer.

Most of these are in Italian, English, and French. But Spanish? We got Spanish: Narvaez, 1672. Russian? We got Russian. Ficher, 1796. And this is an especially good week for German-reading historical fencers, because we have Schmidt from 1713:

This work includes fencing:

 

And even gymnastics, back when gym horses had heads and tails!

Note that these photos here have been heavily reduced in resolution to be transportable. The originals are breathtaking. I can’t do them justice in this format, but this close-up might give you an idea. Each photo is about 25mb in the raw format.

We have the 1600 Meyer.

And to cap it all, when I got home from the trip, I found a box waiting for me: full of the brand-new German edition of my The Medieval Longsword book.

This was translated by my student Frank Polenz, and published by Wieland-Verlag. You can find it here. The designer has done a stunning job of the interior, and frankly, I’ve never looked so good 🙂 You can see some interior shots on their webpage. Incidentally, Wieland have incorporated this book into their own series of “Schwertkampf” books, so don’t be mislead by the series number; it’s #2 in Mastering the Art of Arms, but #3 in Schwertkampf.

This will go very nicely with Der Mittelalterliche Dolch!

And in other news, I’m wrapping up the final edits to my re-translation of De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, so it should be here by the end of the year…

Medieval manuscript construction

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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 of bookbinding and manuscript creation. I've been producing my own bound notebooks for friends and family for the last eight months or so, which came about because I thought it would be very cool to have a copy of De Arte Gladiatoria with the exact same collation (the organisation of the pages in quires (also called gatherings). As readers of this post  will know, the manuscript is made up of five quires, a10 b4 c-d10 e8. Which means that the first quire is five sheets folded over, the second is two, the third and fourth are also of five folded sheets each, and the last is of four. The idea of producing a copy of the ms with the same collation lead me to look into high-end printing options, which sparked the idea for producing fencing manuscripts in affordable high-quality reproductions, which lead to getting both Il Fior di Battaglia and De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi back in print after many centuries, and the birth of Spada Press!

    

It's funny how all sorts of sidetracks can become pretty important thoroughfares.

But these reproductions, lovely as they are, are not hand written on vellum or bound using traditional methods. The Getty Museum (owner of Il Fior di Battaglia) describe how these books used to be made on this page. It includes everything from how vellum is made from skins, to how the scribe makes their own ink, to how the books are bound. You can see the summary video here:

Isn't it beautiful?

The Fitzwilliam museum goes one further, and provides a very detailed series of pages describing how one of their manuscripts was rebound, having been tortured by a ghastly 18th century binder. (It's really amazing how craftsmen up until fairly recently felt perfectly entitled to trim the edges of manuscripts to neaten them up! Christopher de Hamel's wonderful book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts goes into some details about this; even the legendary Book of Kells was ‘tidied up' in this horrific way. A bit like tidying up a haircut by cutting off someone's ears, if you ask me.) The Fitzwilliam website takes us through the decision-making process of approaching the conservation, through undoing the previous binding, through all the stages of bringing the book back to life. For those of a sensitive disposition, this page highlighting the damage that was done by the previous binder, including trimming the pages cutting through the illustrations, and applying red dye to the edges which seeped into the pages, and other horrors, should be avoided.

If in the process of reading this you have discovered your inner bookbinding geek, then you may find these videos enjoyable:

For an overview of the bookbinding process:

And my favourite how-to video series on Youtube is the Bookbinder's Chronicle. The videos are all silent, and slow, and patient, and beautiful, which is just the way bookbinding ought to be done, I think. You can see one that includes some medieval-style binding here:

Yes, procrastinating again. But I'm actually on the road at the moment, consulting with an academic colleague regarding De Arte Gladitoria, and put this post together in a quiet moment last week. If you've read this far, you're probably interested in bookbinding yourself, so do share your own favourite resources in the comments!

Vadi sword geekery

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I'm working on both the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici,  and on the new book The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts, both due out this year. TTPHEMA (catchy title, huh?) will include the answers to just about every HEMA-specific problem that exists, so it will of course cover how to choose a sword. Philippo Vadi's instructions for the size of your sword are the earliest example of sword specs in fencing literature, so they are included in the relevant chapter in TTPHEMA. One of my excellent beta readers suggested that this section could use some clarification:

Note, Vadi does not give any dimensions, only lengths relative to your stature. As in geometry, the exact dimensions are not interesting, as they give just one specific instance of the principle. The proportions are everything, as they can be scaled in any direction without the form being lost. Using Vadi’s stated proportions, my sword should be 133cm (my floor-armpit measurement) and the handle about 21cm (my “span” is 21cm, and I have relatively small hands, so this should be a bit bigger). Allowing about 5cm in addition for the pommel, that gives us 26cm, which is also the length of the crossguard (handle plus pommel). With reference to Peter Johnsson’s article in the Park Lane Arms Fair Catalogue (March 2012), let’s have a brief look at the geometry of this weapon. Using the 26cm hilt length as the diameter of a circle, 5 such adjacent circles will give us an overall length of 130cm: quite close to the 133 of my floor-armpit measurement. So, let us divide 133 by 5 to get a diameter of 26.6cm for our circle. Adding in the connecting circles to create the vesica pattern that Johnsson has established gives us nine interlocking circles. Nine is an excellent number for this kind of thing, being a trinity of trinities.
The crossguard is placed on the circumference of the first circle, and is of the same width as the diameter measurement. Its thickness should be within the third circle, not the first, to avoid taking length off the handle. It is probably square in cross section, and the tips should be pointed. I see this as a shallow pyramid at each end, rather than a chisel point or a serious spike, but that is from a general impression of the illustrations, not hard data.

It's my policy to shut up and listen when my keener readers tell me something isn't clear, so I thought I'd provide an illustrated run-through of the geometry. For the book, I'll get somebody who knows how to do these things create a set of nice clean digital geometry drawings, but I'll need to tell that person what to draw. And then I thought you might like to see it too…

Step One:

Draw a straight line:

Draw a straight line.

Step Two:

Draw five identical circles that just touch each other, with a pair of compasses. The centre of each circle is on the line. I drew the first circle too big (5 wouldn't fit), so ignore the extra large circle at the left-hand end.

Draw five touching circles.

Step Three: 

Draw four more circles, the same size as the previous, with the point of your compasses on the point where the previous circles touch.

[You could do these nine circles in one step, just placing the point of the compasses on the point where the circle you have just drawn cuts the line]

Step Four:

Mark the line for the crossguard, by drawing a line perpendicular to the original line, at the point where the first circle cuts the line.

Step Five:

Draw the crossguard, to the right of the perpendicular line. The crossguard is as long as the diameter of the circle.:

Step Six:

Draw the rest of the sword:

blade:

The handle:

Note I drew the blade too wide the first time, so narrowed it here.

Step Seven

Colour it in and share it with your friends!

I made the blade green because that's the colour of Luke's lightsaber in The Return of the Jedi, my first Star Wars movie.

Some things should be apparent from this post.

  1. I will do anything to please my readers. Within reason…
  2. I really do not know how to draw. This is why I hire people…
  3. I'm not much good at photography either.
  4. I am a sword geek.
  5. Editing is really hard, and I will procrastinate in all sorts of ways…

But, there you have it: applying Peter Johnsson's sword geometry theories to Vadi's sword proportions. You can see the man himself doing it in this rather cool video:

And if you don't already have Choosing a Sword, the second instalment of The Swordsman's Quick Guide, then you can get a copy free by signing up below:

A glossary of medieval Italian fencing terms

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As this awesome comic shows, many students find the new, foreign, terminology a major barrier to learning swordsmanship. (You can see the whole strip here; this is just one panel)

How it feels to take your first sword class in an Italian style… from the excellent web comic Sähköjanis.

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 handout for the Longsword Course that includes the essential terms for studying Fiore and Vadi. If you'd like a copy, sign up below and I'll send you one automagically.