Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for August 2017

Ridolfo Capoferro’s Gran Simulacro: yours free!

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Perhaps the most famous fencing treatise of the 1600s, Ridolfo Capoferro's Gran Simulacro is a wonderful book, and an essential read for all fencing scholars. Characteristically, he spells his name as both Capoferro, and Capo Ferro, in the book itself; just one of it's many interesting quirks! It covers fencing theory, rapier alone, rapier and dagger, rapier and cloak, and rapier and shield. You can download your free copy of the treatise from here.

You are welcome to the RAW image files too (at about 25mb per image), just contact spada.press and we'll arrange to share them with you. The book is free, but you are welcome to drop some money into the (virtual) tin; once the book has raised enough money to pay for production costs, we will gladly produce an affordable printed facsimile. Please note that this book is in Italian.

Further reading:

Translations: William Wilson and Jherek Swanger (free):  Capoferro

Tom Leoni, The Art and Practice of Fencing.

ed. Jared Kirby: Italian Rapier Combat

For an instruction manual on how to fence in Capoferro’s style, please my The Duellist’s Companion.

Awesome sword art

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A tiny, low-res version of Jussi's Messer poster.

Jussi Alarauhio is the graphics genius behind the art for Audatia the medieval combat card game I developed a few years ago. A while back he sent me the poster you see above, which he made for a HEMA club practising (you guessed it) Lechkuchner's messer combat style. It is way too cool not to share, and while the image above had to be reduced dramatically in size for the purposes of putting it on this blog post, you can download a pdf of it here: LechkuchnerMesserPosterLR

If your taste runs to more 3D stuff, have a look at this:

It would be simply wrong of me not to mention that Jussi is available to produce commissions for you, and I can recommend him both in terms of the art he produces (judge for yourself), and as regards his reliability and (in my view unreasonably low) costs. You can contact him through his website, here where there is even more cool art. Enjoy!

Please note, I'm on holiday in Finland at the moment, so will be slower than usual in replying to pretty much anything.

Filed Under: Fun

More productive procrastination

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I have been meaning to sort out a standing desk solution for my workspace for oh, about 7 months now. A couple of weeks ago I started reading Kelly Starrett’s book Deskbound. (Potted review: great information, bitty presentation. Thorough, but repetitive, and way too much referring to his super-cool fighter pilot clients. Essential reading for ergonomics at work, but I wish he’d got me to edit it for him.)

The book reminded me that sitting down to work will kill me so I was galvanized into action, and designed and built a standing desk solution that fits with my existing desk. There was no space to put a standalone desk, and that would take a lot more time anyway. I was most pleased with finding an apt use for the piece of walnut left over from my sister’s wedding present, and my friend Heli’s meditation stool.

Dovetails, with a mitred front, and the cork feet that the whole thing sits on.Of course I ended up adding edge banding to the boxes (oak and maple), and cutting some not-too-gappy-dovetails in both boxes,

but that was way quicker than the heavily engineered adjustability I was originally thinking of. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

The walnut top with a groove for fitting my keyboard and trackpad.

As with my writing set up of DOOM, this set up I have now means there are no excuses left for not getting my writing done.

I set the desk up yesterday morning, and that very same day sent print-outs of the second edition of Veni Vadi Vici to the academic peer reviewers. We’ll see what they say! It’s good to have that off my plate for a bit; there’s nothing I can do with that book until I hear back from them, probably next month at the earliest.

There is a busy week coming up next week; on Tuesday, I’m flying to Helsinki with  the entire family; teaching class in the Helsinki salle on Thursday, and a seminar there on Sunday, before getting home on Wednesday morning, and driving up to Glasgow to see my brother in law, and then to Dumfries for my dad’s birthday at the weekend… so if I’m a little absent and slow to respond to things, that’s why.

All of this has also meant that there has been little forward motion on The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts (I’m thinking of titling it The HEMA Bible. What do you think? let me know in the comments here). There is not a great deal left to do on it, but I found a couple of gaps to fill, and I want it to hit the presses as a thoroughly comprehensive set of solutions to every type of HEMA problem.

Speaking of comprehensive; if you study medieval martial arts of any kind, you really should buy and read this book:

And if you study German medieval combat, you absolutely must buy and read it. It is HEMA geekery at its very finest, a serious in-depth academic study of the Fechtbuch of Lew the Jew, with a complete translation into English, and a concordance of the different manuscripts. The whole book is in German and English, so there’s really no excuse. It’s not even very expensive. Buy it. I had the pleasure of providing some language help with the English translations of the academic bits, so I may be biased, but damn, this is fine work.

And just in case you missed it; the first book from the ‘digitise the National Fencing Museum's library' project is ready, and yours for free.