Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for June 2018

Imposter Syndrome

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Who am I to be writing this blog post?

Nobody. I’m sure there are a thousand people out there who would do it better. 

But a friend of mine asked me, not them, so here we go.

First, I’ll define my terms, so we can get a good look at the beast before we kill it. Then I’ll go over several approaches for getting your stuff done despite that horrid little whisper in the back of your head going “Why are you doing this? You’re not good enough! Who the hell do you think you are?”

What is Imposter Syndrome?

This comic from xkcd.com nails it:

The standard definition is:

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a concept describing individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. The term was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes. Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they really are. While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been found to affect both men and women, in roughly equal numbers. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

In short then, imposter syndrome is the cognitive fallacy in which people who are actually quite good at what they do nonetheless feel like a fraud doing it. They cannot say “I’m good at my job” or “I deserve to be taken seriously as an expert in my field.”

People almost never have an accurate assessment of their own skill level.  At the other extreme, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias which deludes incompetent people into thinking they are more competent than they really are. This is caused by their own inability to perceive their own incompetence; they are literally not fit to judge their own level. As I see it, we all live on the continuum between incompetent overconfidence, and competent uncertainty. A lack of confidence in your own infallibility is actually a mark of skill and experience, and it is normal for your ability to perceive your own level of skill to change relative to the skill itself. As I tell my students, as you get better, your ability to see your mistakes gets better too, and so if all goes well there will never be a time when you think you’re actually doing it perfectly. Get used to it!

The best illustration of this is from Mark Dalessio, which shows the normal development of an artist (or practitioner in any field).  He is using drawing as the example art, but it applies to everything. This version has been reworked from his original idea:

People suffering from imposter syndrome are just stuck in the pink bit, where your ability to evaluate is greater than your ability to make art.

Distinguishing between knowing your flaws and Imposter Syndrome

Let's be quite clear about the difference between imposter syndrome and feeling that you need to develop your skills. I'm a big fan of the Aristotelian model of virtue, where virtue is the midpoint between two vices. In other words any virtue taken to an extreme in either direction becomes a vice. If you are completely confident in your amazing expertise then you are as deluded as if you are completely confident of your amazing ineptitude. Virtue lies in between, where you can accurately assess your strengths and weaknesses, and work to strengthen your weaknesses and take advantage of your strengths, and thus get better at the thing you're trying to do. 

Dealing with irrational fears

Imposter syndrome is an irrational fear. Despite external evidence of your competence, you have an irrational fear of being exposed as a fraud. Irrational fears are not easily dismissed by reason or evidence. If you are suffering from imposter syndrome then being suddenly presented with evidence of how competent you truly are isn't necessarily going to help. What may help would be reframing those feelings, and reframing the situation, to enable you to accomplish the thing that you are trying to accomplish, despite the imposter syndrome. 

In my own experience of imposter syndrome, over a decade of gradually accumulating evidence that I was actually good at my job eventually did away with the idea that I wasn’t a very good martial arts instructor. Getting a PhD for my research finally put paid to the feeling that I wasn’t very good at the academic side. It would now feel false and weird to pretend I’m not an expert in my field. But oh lord it took a while. So the accumulation of evidence might help, but it might also just make you feel worse, because of another godawful cognitive bias, confirmation bias, which is your mind’s tendency to notice and believe in evidence that confirms your existing opinions, and overlook or discount evidence that contradicts your opinions. So sufferers of imposter syndrome will remember every mistake, and forget the victories. 

So who is this Windsor fellow to be telling me any damn thing? 

To be read to the strains of the incomparable Freddie Mercury:

Let’s go back to my first question: “who am I to be writing this blog post?”

My actual thought process was this:

“This problem is very common, and I have some experience of it, so while no doubt there are many more qualified people to write this, none have my own specific experience or approach, and so this may not be a complete waste of your time. And besides, Naomi asked.”

Naomi is Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz. She interviewed me for her ‘Write a Book With Me’ course, and imposter syndrome came up in the conversation. I wrote this post because she asked me to.

See what I did there? Though it may be true that there are others more qualified, I can still do it because:

 a) I have a unique personal perspective, 

b) I think if you experience this problem you might be better off with this post than without it, and 

c) I have a gatekeeper who said it’s ok. If you look through this blog, there are dozens of posts that begin with a question from a reader, or something like that, which is always true, but also a really handy way to get me over the imposter syndrome barrier.

These are the three main mental tricks I use to get round the problem, but each have their own strengths and weaknesses, so I’ll unpack them.

What is my experience?

When I started my school in 2001 I was 27 years old, completely unqualified, and with very little experience. This was a classic recipe for imposter syndrome. Though I was unqualified to teach historical swordsmanship, there were no qualifications available, and the sense that I was not as good as my students deserved lead me to study a lot, train a lot, and travel a lot to meet other instructors, and invite the best of them over to my school to teach seminars. It was a very sharp spur to growth.

Though feeling like a fraud was a good driver of improvement, it also led me into some awful mistakes. That's the real problem with imposter syndrome: it either stops you doing things altogether, which would be disastrous, or it drives you to make mistakes because you're coming from a position of inferiority. I was desperately looking for somebody to say “yes Guy, you have permission, here’s a pat on the head.” There was nobody really out there who was qualified to say that, but I went looking for them anyway and sure enough, nature abhors a vacuum. I fell in with some people who gave exactly that kind of pat on the head but they were unfortunately not really qualified themselves in this field, and not only that, their whole approach was so different to mine that it was very counter-productive. Instead of growing and developing under their unqualified gaze I just felt even more inferior and useless and dreadful. 

Keeping your students off-balance is a power play that some kinds of instructor use to keep students in their place. I was discussing this one night in a hotel room in Detroit with three of my instructor friends, and one of them looked at me and said “Guy why do you give so much power to people who obviously don't like you very much?” That floored me. It was clear that I was giving my power away, and as the head of a school it was completely inappropriate, because giving away my power was basically giving my students power away at the same time. Whatever power they had invested in me I was passing on without their permission to these people. This was bad in all sorts of ways.

Younger martial arts instructors often suffer from imposter syndrome, especially if they have not been properly trained to teach, and it is very often what leads them to being aggressive or bullying in class. The behaviour is usually driven by some species of imposter syndrome. They feel they have to be on top of the class and remain on top of the class to feel safe from being exposed as a fraud. And if anybody threatens their authority in any way then they have to beat them down quickly, because their entire sense of self is at stake. This explains much but excuses nothing.

Outside of the world of martial arts, you can see the same pattern, with imposter syndrome creating bullies, or preventing people from acting at all. I think we can agree then that imposter syndrome is a Bad Thing. So what do we do about it?

Will they be better off with this or without this?

This, to my mind, is the key solution. When producing anything (a book, a class, whatever), the question to answer is not “am I the best person to do this?”, or “will this be perfect?”

The question is “will my readers/students/whoever be better off with this or without it?”

This comes up a lot for me when my students are readying themselves to start teaching. They know perfectly well that within my school there are many people who could teach that class better; people with a decade more experience, or even full-time professionals. Their gaze is in the wrong direction, looking ahead at their teachers, instead of back at their students. If the question is rephrased as “these students need a beginners’ class tonight. Guy and co. aren’t here, so it’s either me taking it, or we cancel. Would they be better off with my class, or no class?” the problem disappears. This is why I get students teaching as early as possible, with the bar set at “can you maintain a safe environment?” not “can you transform these students into master swordsmen in record time?”

It’s a much smaller problem for writers. Does anyone ever thank you for your advice on this topic? Do you get emails in which people ask for your help? If so, then there will definitely be people out there better off with your advice than without it. 

Using a gatekeeper

Naomi asked me to write this. I know it could be better. I know there are others far more qualified to write it. But I’m not the gatekeeper, she is. Problem solved. Of course this has its limits; it’s not actually Naomi’s responsibility what goes up on this blog, and it’s my name on it, not hers. But as a permission-giving exercise, it works.

In some cases, it can be very useful to delegate the evaluation of your work to others. Traditional publishing houses do this: they expect agents to send proposals to editors, who run it by their board: three layers of gatekeeping. But with bloggers or independent publishers like me, there is no gatekeeper. Cue massive “how do I know I’m good enough?” self-doubt across the board.

This is where your friends, martial arts teacher, or a professional editor can come in handy. My students start teaching before they feel ready, because practically nobody ever feels ready. But I train them for it, and they can safely leave it up to me to tell them when they’re objectively good enough (I encourage them at this point- I would never require them to teach a class). It is not usually a freelance editor’s job to tell the client whether the book is good enough or not. But if you find an editor you can work with, it is a service you can request from them. Mentors are good for this in every field. Friends are less good at gatekeeping, because they love you and think you’re great. A bit like your mum. To be believable, they must be able to tell you your work is crap, so it's better to ask colleagues or acquaintances. Anyone you know well enough to ask, but who is not risking a long relationship if they don’t like your work and your feelings get hurt (which they will, because your work isn't perfect, and if they are any use, they'll show you the flaws, and that's painful but necessary).

Some further reframing ideas to get around the problem:

I’ll take writing a book as an example (because I’ve written a ton of books, and because I originally wrote this post for the students on Naomi’s book writing course).

1. You can only be exposed as a fraud if you publish the book, so don't set out to publish a book, set out to write a book to develop your own expertise. The reason I wrote my Duellist’s Companion was that I knew I needed to have a solid understanding of a historical rapier system and I figured the best way to organize my thoughts, research, and training would be to start writing a book about it. The book would drive the training. That’s exactly what happened. Two years later, I had the completed book, and I had a thorough working knowledge of Capoferro’s rapier system. 

2. Imposter syndrome will then only prevent you from publishing, which is why you don’t have to publish. You could just show it to a friend of yours, someone who you know reasonably well, someone who you like whom you know likes you (whether you deserve it or not). Let them tell you what's good about it and what's bad about it. And you still don’t have to publish it. Based on your friend’s suggestions you might improve the book enough that a few more people could read it… and so on. If publishing is intimidating, don’t think about it; write the book to help one friend, not to spread it far and wide. When it’s finished, then make a decision about whether any other living soul will ever see it.

3. None of it’s original! I’m not original! Yes, plagiarism is fraud. But if you're quoting from anybody or if you're inspired or influenced by anybody, just make sure that they are abundantly acknowledged in the book. Then there's no problem. You may be assembling a whole bunch of other people's ideas into your own understanding of the topic that you're writing about. But you may find that the work you have done assembling the information makes it useful to others… it would just be selfish not to share it, right? Most cookbooks are full of recipes the writer did not invent.

4. It’s your story. There may be a hundred other books out there on your topic; there are certainly lots of other blog posts on Imposter Syndrome. But how many written by a professional swordsman? You bring your own unique vision, personality, and approach to your topic. It’s yours. And some people will prefer your voice to all those others out there.

Let’s continue by looking at some of the ramifications of the problem:

So what if you aren’t that good?

When you get behind the wheel of a car you take everybody else on the road’s lives in your hands. As well as your own and those of your passengers. And yet you do it. In martial arts, the worst case scenario is a student gets killed or badly injured. But publishing a book, now that’s scary? C’mon. Let’s get some perspective. The worst case scenario for writing a bad book is that it gets published, becomes popular, and then gets revealed as a pile of crap. Very embarrassing, and way worse than it never being published, or being published and not selling much. Unless your book deals with life and death situations (do NOT give medical advice if you’re not a doctor, or automobile maintenance advice if you’re not a mechanic), then the worst case scenario is exposure as an incompetent. 

But if what you’re afraid of is being seen as better than you are, then being exposed as incompetent will actually come as a relief. Now everybody knows, and your imposter syndrome turns out to be not a cognitive bias, but an accurate assessment of your level. That’s a win, right?

The role of qualifications

Imagine you’d spent the best part of a decade in medical school, and are finally qualified as a doctor. To be sure, you’d be very aware of your lack of experience; you’d be a junior doctor. But a doctor nonetheless, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. Qualifications that are attained through sustained effort and with an examining procedure that it is possible to fail can go a long way towards curing imposter syndrome, or at least providing a workaround.

Qualifications as a whole do three things:

1. They protect the patient. In fields where real harm can be done, rigorous training and examination are essential. Would you want to fly in a plane serviced by someone who just rocked up to the airfield with a bag of tools and a cheesy grin? Or by a qualified mechanic?

2. They protect the profit margins of the qualified. The higher the barriers to entry, the more you can charge. It’s simple economics.

3. They give you permission. Literally, a pat on the head and a “you got this”. This is especially true in areas where no qualification is strictly required to practise. This is why MFA degrees exist: to give wannabe writers permission to write that great American novel. And that’s also why there is absolutely no correlation between having an MFA and writing good books. Readers don’t care about your qualifications, unless they are directly relevant to the topic. Do you have any, if they’re available? Or do you just want a qualification to make you feel better about your sense of being a fraud?  

Other opinions

There are many, many, blog posts out there dealing with this problem. One of my favourites, because it’s short, sharp, to the point, and totally different to how I think about it, was written by my virtual assistant Kate Tilton. She offers three rules to live by, which are: 1. What I feel is not always the truth, 2) What I do is not what I will always do or who I am, and 3) Being one thing today does not mean I won’t be anything else. If they strike a chord with you, go read her post!

It’s never a bad move to invoke SCIENCE, so you can begin your academic study of the phenomenon on Pubmed here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10626367

Adulting

It used to be that ‘adult’ was a noun, not a verb. But I’ve noticed that over the last decade or so people have been using it to describe behaving as an adult especially when they don’t really feel like they’re grown-ups: “I made a healthy breakfast and got the kids to school on time. Adulting achievement unlocked!” 

This is imposter syndrome writ large: “I may be 40, employed, married, a parent, with a mortgage, etc etc, but I really feel like I’m about 12 and the whole big world out there is full of super-organised grown-ups and I’m not really one…” 

But here’s the thing: practically nobody feels like a proper grown-up. 

Lois McMaster Bujold’s book A Civil Campaign (1999) has a brilliant passage on this. One of the main characters, Ekaterin Vorsoisson, is speaking to a couple of younger women (the ellipses and italics are in the original): 

“Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste… years trying to get someone to give that respect to you as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough. If only you are good enough. No you have to just… take it, give it to yourself, I suppose.”

(From page 268 of the paperback edition, if you want to go read the whole conversation. Or even the whole novel, it’s fantastic space opera.)

The difference between subject matter experts (or adults) with imposter syndrome and subject matter experts (or adults) without imposter syndrome is simply the ones without it have given themselves permission to be good at what they're doing. It is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do for yourself. 

The last of the Bolognese: Senese’s The True Handling of the Sword, yours free.

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I am delighted to announce that the National Fencing Museum's copy of Alessandro Senese's rapier treatise from 1660 is now available to download from here. The download includes a zip file of edited jpgs, and a pdf for handy reference. If you need the full-res raw files at 25mb/page, email me and I'll send you a link.

The book is in beautiful condition, and is perfectly legible throughout (assuming you read Italian and Latin). Most of the technical content is in Italian, though there is a long section at the end in Latin with some very interesting illustrations:

I think the text means “figure that shows the theory of wounding the left side of the enemy”, but my Latin is shockingly bad, so don't take my word for it.

This is a wonderful little book- and it's yours to do what you want with. These images come from the photo shoot I did at the museum with Malcolm Fare and James Hester, and are released into the public domain. Note though that the more money they generate through your voluntary donations, the faster we will get the rest of the images we shot edited and out into your waiting hands.

It's here.

Fiore scholars, you must have this book. A review of Flowers of Battle

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Last year my friends at Freelance Academy Press boldly crowdfunded a publishing project: reproducing in facsimile and translation all four of the extant Fiore manuscripts. I supported the campaign, of course, and my copy of the first volume arrived some time ago. Flowers of Battle, Volume 1.

I left it unopened for a couple of months because a) I was scared that it might not live up to expectations and b) I wanted to make sure I had a good chunk of uninterrupted time to go through it.

Oh my. What a book. Greg Mele and Tom Leoni have produced a lasting monument to Fiore, and a fabulous resource for all scholars of our arts.

If you are a Fiore scholar, you simply have to have it. If you study other medieval martial arts, you really should have it. 

Buy it here. Go now, and don’t come back until you’ve bought it. It's only $125, and worth twice that, at least. Eat cheap food and don't drink alcohol for a month and there's your cash.

Welcome back.

The book comprises three sections: Fiore dei Liberi and His World, The Art of Arms, and the facsimile, transcription and translation of the Getty ms.

The first section is a historical tour de force, which includes biographies of Fiore, Niccolo d’Este, and Galeazzo da Mantoa, and detailed discussion of the weapons, armour, clothing, and duelling culture of the time. It’s fantastic; this section alone justifies buying the book.

The next section is an overview of the manuscript, which for me is perhaps the least useful part of this book, but will serve the less experienced very well. Yes, those of you familiar with my interpretations will find some things there that I would disagree with, but so what? It’s a thoughtful and in-depth overview of the manuscript as seen through the eyes of a very experienced practitioner.

The facsimile, translation, and transcription are very good; the translation itself is by Tom Leoni, and it is the cleanest, most accurate published translation out there. You have to have it, even if you can read the Italian. The transcription is helpful to have, though it’s rendered in a font that mimics the handwriting; it’s perfectly clear to read, but it’s not as instantly legible as it might be. I have not checked the entire transcription for accuracy, but the parts I have looked at have been flawless. My biggest quibble would be with the layout.

As you can see, on each page you get the manuscript folio on one side, and the transcription and translation on the other. This makes the entire book easy to refer to, but it interferes with the visual presentation of the manuscript. In these examples, these two pages should both be visible at once, as together they show the ‘five things’ you should know regarding the dagger. I think Fiore was careful about many of the two-page spreads we see in the book, and that element is lost in this edition.

I think the perfect approach is the one taken in the Royal Armouries ms I.33 by Extraordinary Editions: a perfect facsimile in one volume, and a translation and transcription in another, overlaid on the images as you can see:

I think I understand why they did it though, and there are always compromises to be made. Fortunately, you can get a very reasonably-priced bound facsimile of the manuscript to go with this glorious book. But if you don't have Flowers of Battle yet, save your pennies and buy that first. Clear?

There’s one thing that I ought to give you some background on. I am honoured to have been included in the acknowledgments, with the following:

Guy Windsor, for challenging our interpretations and forcing us to rethink them. … victory is not always ours.

Way back when, maybe 2003, Tom Leoni got it into his head that I am the spitting image of Stewie, from Family Guy. And pretty much every time we’ve met he’s asked me to say “Victory is mine!”. 

So this acknowledgment in the book is a continuation of a joke that has been running for about 15 years. I must say though, that when it comes to this book, victory is most certainly theirs. Bravo, gentlemen, bravo.

Freedom to Strike: a lengthy discussion of largo and stretto

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Ultra-geeky sword post alert: this is a lengthy and detailed discussion of some really specific terms from Fiore. Expect pedantry and nit-pickery, in the service of a definition of terms which has little bearing on how we actually fight. Read on only if that sort of thing floats your boat. I have written this because a friend and colleague asked me what I thought about ‘largo' and ‘stretto' these days. It turned out longer than I expected.

Since study began on medieval and Renaissance Italian swordsmanship, the terms giocco largo and giocco stretto have been discussed at length. The earliest reference we have to these terms is in Fiore dei Liberi’s Il Fior di Battaglia, (c.a. 1400) and they are a consistent feature of most Italian sources from then until the middle of the sixteenth century, after which they are less common.

I'm going to be using the Italian terms a lot in this article, so let's take a moment to look at translating them into English. Giocco (or zogho in FdB) means ‘play’ or ‘game’. This is consistent and unremarkable, and has about the same connotations as the English word. I can’t think of an expression in either language where you might translate the term as anything else: it even works in mechanics, where slippage in a mechanism is ‘play’ in English, and ‘gioco’ in Italian. I should note that there is no connotation of measure with this term. Measure is misura.

‘Largo’ means ‘wide’, with connotations of ‘loose’, such as in the expression ‘questa giacca mi sta larga’, ‘this jacket is loose on me’, or ‘open’, such as in the expression ‘andare al largo’, ‘to go out into the open sea’. Sticking with the maritime theme for a moment, ‘off the coast of Pisa’ would be ‘al largo di Pisa’. Freedom of movement is implied, as is space to play in.

‘Stretto’ is the past participle of the verb ‘stringere’, which means ‘to constrain’, ‘to grip’, ‘to squeeze’. It has a lot of connotations, and you can see many of them at this convenient dictionary link: https://dictionary.reverso.net/italian-english/stringere There is no one perfect English equivalent. Stretto as an adjective is ‘narrow’ or ‘tight’, such as in the expression ‘questa giacca mi sta stretta’, ‘this jacket is tight on me’, with the implication of restricted movement. To return to the maritime theme: ‘una stretta di mare’ is a ‘strait’, a narrow channel of water between two pieces of land. It’s worth noting that it’s only used to indicate ‘close’ in phrases like ‘un parente stretto’, ‘a close relative’. Close would normally be translated as ‘vicino’. The single English word that best fits the set of meanings is “constrained”.

While these examples are modern, there is no reason to believe that the meanings of these words have changed over time; I’ve tried to find evidence that they may have, and failed. In modern HMA parlance, the usual translations used are ‘wide play' and ‘close play'. Neither is particularly apt; ‘loose play' and ‘constrained play' would be better, but there's little chance of changing them in the wider community after so long. But bear the connotations in mind.

For most of the time since we began studying these sources, most people have translated and interpreted them to mean ‘wide play’, as in fencing from far away, and ‘close play’ as in getting to grips; in other words, the defining feature is measure. I published this theory myself in The Swordsman’s Companion in 2004. Many of my colleagues (excellent people all) still hold that opinion, which you can read a full discussion of in Greg Mele's article here. The article is explicit: “Zogho Stretto (close or narrow play) is the measure at which dei Liberi…”

For the last decade or so I have held a more nuanced view of their meanings. I’ll confine my interpretation remarks to Fiore, as that’s where the most disagreement lies, and also where I have the most experience and expertise. And I’ll include here all my published opinions on the subject, so you can see how they have developed over time. Before I get onto this, I should be clear that the ambiguities occur only when discussing the sword; all abrazare and dagger plays are considered ‘stretto’, and the grappling plays of the sword mostly occur in the ‘stretto’ section. On this we can all agree.

Where we disagree is the notion that the term ‘giocco stretto' is effectively synonymous with ‘misura stretta' (which in Capoferro's Gran Simulacro at least is the measure at which you can strike without passing, which we might indeed call ‘close measure').

As I see it, in Fiore's plays, the defining tactical consideration (and the organising principle of the longsword section of his book) is the crossing of the swords, in which the measure is approximately the same, but the blade relationship, and so tactical situation, is quite different.

This gif illustrates the point nicely:

Getty Longsword Crossings

make action GIFs like this at MakeaGif

 

These are the three crossings from the Getty ms, centred on the front foot of the player. The outstandingly obvious conclusion is that the measure seems pretty much the same, but the blade relationship changes hugely. (With thanks to Joeli Takala who made a gif like this in 2010, which I reproduced because the original stopped moving.) There is no question that one of the two crossings shown at the middle of the blade is ‘zogho largo', and the other is ‘zogho stretto', as they are the first images from those sections. From one, we are free to strike, from the other, our best course is to enter with a pass ‘and come to the strette'. [I know that some researchers consider the images to be unreliable, but in my experience they are almost invariably very accurate. And once you start playing the ‘but the drawings aren't photos' card, you might as well discard all the pictures altogether, because it opens the door to making the images say whatever you want them to.]

So as I see it, “zogho stretto” is a tactical condition of the play, to which our best response is to enter in. Zogho stretto in general is ‘the condition of play in which you are constrained and cannot strike directly”, and zogho largo in general is “the condition of play in which you are free to strike”. “Le strette”, “the constrained ones”, is the term for techniques in which we come to grips. Yes, they are done from closer in than the “unconstrained plays”, but to say that they are defined purely by their measure is wrong; they are defined by being grappling actions.

That's the short version. I shall now expand at considerable length…

Back in 2009, I published an article that described my new understanding of largo and stretto, and includes an analysis and interpretation of all of Fiore's longsword plays out of armour. Please read it, and then we'll move on… you can download the pdf from here:

Crossing Swords 2009

Back again? Excellent.

Recall this passage:

It is my contention that zogho largo, wide play, describes the actions that are safe to do when the attacker’s point is driven wide. Zogho stretto, close play, describes the actions that we must do if the attacker’s sword is too close to us when we are crossed. The correct action then is to pass with the cover (i.e. without leaving the cross) and execute one of the close play plays.
As the defender, one should not seek out the close play; as Fiore states, from the stretto cross, either person can do the plays that follow. But by passing in, we prevent the attacker from winding the point into our face.

My interpretation of the basic form of these plays as it stood in 2009 can be seen in these videos:

Sword in One Hand:

Zogho Largo:

Zogho Stretto:

My current up to date and explained in detail interpretation of these same plays are Section 8 of my Complete Medieval Longsword Course

I should point out that introducing this interpretation of largo and stretto did more to prevent double hits in freeplay in my school than any other change to the way we conceptualise Fiore's art. Suddenly, people started paying much more attention to whether an action was appropriate in the context they found themselves, simply because they now had a way to define that context.

By 2014, my thinking had not changed particularly, despite my colleagues’ best efforts to persuade me that it was all about measure: in my book The Medieval Longsword, pages 43-45, 2014, I wrote:

Perhaps the most overt tactical distinction Fiore uses is between zogho largo, universally translated as “wide play”, and zogho stretto, which may be translated as “close”, “constrained” “narrow” or “tight” play. I find “constrained” to be the most accurate rendering, but “close” is currently the most common choice. This topic has produced perhaps the most persistent and widespread disagreement amongst Fiore scholars, so I will go into some detail regarding what I think these concepts mean, and how I use them.

Fiore’s plays of the sword in two hands are clearly divided into the 20 plays of the zogho largo and the 23 plays of the zogho stretto. There are also plays done with the sword in one hand, in armour, and on horseback. The distinction between, say, the plays of the sword in armour and those of the sword on horseback are pretty obvious. The distinction between what constitutes zogho largo and what constitutes zogho stretto has been far less clear. In my first book, I defined the terms gioco largo (wide play) and gioco stretto (close play) as functions of measure: when you are close enough to touch your opponent with your hand, you are in gioco stretto. If you can reach him with your sword using one step or fewer, you are in gioco largo. This is a useful distinction to make, especially when classifying and cataloguing techniques.

For many years, this stood as the standard interpretation of zogho largo and zogho stretto, however, this is clearly not how Fiore uses the terms. (Remember our earlier discussion of changes in interpretations? Here you can see my pressure-test system in action.) In il Fior di Battaglia, we clearly see actions done close-in but placed in the zogho largo section (such as the 14th play of the second master), and actions done from quite far away placed in the zogho stretto (such as the 12th play). So what, then, do “wide” and “close” play refer to?

Simply put, the relationship between the two swords when they cross. There is a plethora of circumstances in which you are free to leave the crossing and strike as you will—these are all considered “largo”. In other circumstances the conditions of the bind are such that if you leave the crossing you will immediately be struck. In these cases you are constrained to enter in under cover, and use one of the “close plays”.

In practice, the type of crossing that demands close play is very specific: you must be crossed at the middle of the swords, with the points in presence (i.e. threatening the target) and sufficient pressure between the swords such that if one player releases the bind, he will be immediately struck. Ideally both players have their right foot forwards, which makes it easier to enter in. This is a situation of equality, in which either player should do the close play techniques.

In all other circumstances, most commonly when the opponent’s sword has been beaten aside, it is safe to leave the crossing to strike your opponent. This is the fundamental condition of wide play. If it is necessary to maintain contact with the opponent’s sword and enter to grapple or pommel strike, you are constrained to the close play. So, the plays are ordered according to the kind of crossing that they follow. These conditions exist in a continuum. As the opponent’s sword gets closer, and the bind gets firmer, your ideal response changes. As it switches from “leave the bind and strike” (largo) to “keep in contact with the bind and enter” (stretto), so you will find your ideal response in one section of the book or the other. Identifying these conditions is perhaps the key tactical distinction to make in this system. Note that close play techniques can often be done in a wide play situation, but wide play techniques cannot be done from a close-play crossing without extreme risk. The techniques we see in the 10th, 14th, and 15th plays of the second master of the zogho largo (crossed at the middle of the swords) section are clearly “close”, and there is no practical distinction between for example the 10th play here and the 2nd play of the zogho stretto. It’s apparent then that we have a choice: either Fiore organised his book as a catalogue of techniques arranged by the measure in which they occur, with several errors, or ordered them according to the tactical circumstances in which they should be done, with no errors. Which would you choose?

As a rule of thumb, if your opponent’s sword is moving towards you, or pressing in, you must bind it to prevent it from hitting you (stretto). If it is moving away from you, you can simply strike (largo).

Wide and close play describe what happens, but can also be used to describe a set of tactical preferences, an approach to the fight. When fencing an opponent who is much more comfortable in wide play, we may engineer a situation where only close play techniques will work. We can also of course deny a close-playing opponent the context he wants, and slip away into wide play as he tries to constrain us. A good fencer will be comfortable with both contexts, though most people have a preference for one type of play or the other.

This interpretation is still my default, though I would express it differently now. In short, you are in ‘wide play’ when you are free to leave the crossing to strike, and in ‘constrained play’ when you have to maintain contact with your opponent’s sword to strike.

So where do I stand now? 

In combat, you are only likely to have your freedom of motion constrained by some threat or physical contact from your opponent. When it comes to making decisions under pressure, it’s usually unhelpful to have more options than necessary, because every choice slows you down. So I think the point of the largo-stretto distinction is to reduce the likelihood of getting hit by making it as clear as possible when it is safe to strike. It’s a tactical distinction, not a technical one. The tactical situation is determined by the following conditions:

Measure: how far apart are you? Yes, measure is a critical component of the condition of play, but not its defining feature.

Movement: where is everything going? Is your opponent pushing in, pulling back, binding strongly, yielding? And you?

Blade relationship: are the blades crossed, and if so, how?

I’ll expand on these one at a time:

Measure: 

If you are in range to strike without stepping, this distinction is crucial. Are you free, or constrained? Outside that measure, it’s irrelevant. Fiore does not explicitly discuss measure at any point- the term is used once only, on the segno page under the lynx: E acquello mette sempre a sesta e a misura. Clearly, if he had wanted to define the plays of the sword by their measure, he had the linguistic tools to do so. We can see that at the moment the swords cross, the measure is approximately the same in all three crossings, and it's at the moment of the crossing that tactical situation is defined. To be in either largo or stretto play, you must be close enough to strike.

Movement:

The measure and the blade relationship will normally be in constant flux. Sword fighters rarely stand still when this close together. The exact positioning of the players at a given moment is less important than the direction they are moving in. If your opponent’s actions are such that you have to bind their sword, you’re probably in a stretto situation. If they are moving away from you, then you are probably freer.

Blade relationship:

Is your weapon controlling your opponent’s? If not, it should be. 

Let me quote again from The Medieval Longsword  pages 159-161

Whoever masters the crossing, gets the strike. All medieval swordsmanship sources emphasise what happens when the blades cross. This crossing can be reduced to three critical factors: where on the blades the cross occurs, where the points of the swords end up, and how much pressure is being exerted. Up to now, almost every parry has been aimed middle to middle, and has worked as intended, beating the sword aside, with the exception of the “sticky” cut against the position of the sword in one hand. This was by way of introduction to the idea of binding the sword, which is a process of gaining mechanical control of your opponent’s weapon using your own.

In combat, the crossings of the sword happen so fast, and ideally last for such a short time, that it is unusual to respond to their specific conditions as they occur; more commonly, cues in our opponent’s prior movements indicate what will happen when the blades meet. It is nonetheless useful to analyse the possible crossings, to get an idea of what may occur and what you should do about it. This section is a bit like explaining traffic lights to a driving student.

Let’s start with where on the blades the cross is made. Most of the time you would be aiming for a cross at the middle of both swords, but Fiore divides the blade (as we have seen) into three parts: the tutta spada (the first section near the hilt), the mezza spada (the middle section) and the punta di spada (the last section, near the point). Mathematicians will have no difficulty working out that there are nine possible combinations of places on the sword where the crossing happens:

 We must also consider the position of your point, close enough to be a threat, or wide, and his, close or wide, so multiply 9×4 and we get 36 possible crossings. Add to that (or rather multiply) the degree of pressure between the blades (let’s be binary and say strong or weak—we could have a dozen gradations of strength) and we have 72 crossings. And lastly, which side is open—inside, outside or neither? So multiply by three and we get 216 possible meetings of the swords. That is patently absurd. Let’s carve it down a bit.

What matters most is what you can do from a given relationship of the blades. In practice, it is only possible to apply pressure when meeting at the mezza or the tutta of your sword. So where there is a punta involved, that sword (or both) are always weak in the bind.

Also, when crossed at the points, the points of the swords can’t be threatening either of you directly, as you are either too far away, or they are pointing up or to the side, so it can always be consid- ered “wide”. Likewise, when crossed at the tuttas, the points must be wide, or there would have been a strike already, you’re so close. Where one point is against another’s mezza or tutta, there should be sufficient leverage advantage that the punta is always weak in the bind, and will be driven wide. So, that same table now looks like this:

It should go without saying that you strike on the side he is open; if you aren’t sure, if neither side is clearly open, go to the other side (so if your sword is on the right of his, go to the left). This is because whatever force he is using to keep you out of the centre should open that line when you release your counter-pressure.

The only part of the table where there is any real ambiguity is the middle one, where the swords have met in the middles: the points may be wide or close, and the bind may be strong or weak. If his point is close, and the bind is strong, you must enter into the close plays. This crossing leads only to the zogho stretto. If his point has been driven wide, and/or there is little pressure in the bind, it is safe to either grab his blade and strike (if it is close) or just strike (if his point is wide). These are examples of zogho largo.

And what about Vadi? Well, he doesn’t divide his 20 plays of the longsword this way, but he does refer to largo and stretto play, principally in his Chapter 3: Theory of the Sword, especially on folio 5v. You can download my free translation of the entire manuscript from here and make up your own mind… Or if you're feeling wealthy, you could by the snazzy hardback of the whole book: my new The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest!

For the perspective of a Bolognese fencer, Ilkka Hartikainen has an article on the terms here.

So let me sum up:

Being close enough to strike is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the term ‘zogho stretto’ to apply. If you are free to strike, and have room to do so, the play is ‘largo’. If you are constrained, the play is ‘stretto’. Fiore’s solution to the problem of being constrained is to enter in with a pass, to get to grips (he does love his wrestling); grappling plays of every kind are ‘strette'. It’s worth noting that we find different solutions to the same tactical situation (as shown in the crossing of the master) in the German medieval sources, which often recommend a winding action instead. 

Zogho stretto is a type of play, not a specific measure. All of Fiore’s stretto plays involve grappling, which requires you to get close. But that isn’t what the term means.

This interpretation makes teaching decision making at the crossing easy. A catalogue of techniques organised by measure is not useful; a distinction of when to do what is much more so. So whether you agree with my thesis or not, you can still use the idea behind it to make better tactical decisions in the moment. I think the best thing about this interpretation is that it is directly applicable to winning fights, of which I'm pretty sure Fiore would have approved.

Hypocrisy

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Hypocrisy is deliberately saying one thing and doing another. Pretending to be something you are not, or pretending to believe something that you do not. Lecturing others on family values while cheating on your spouse, for instance.

The problem with having values is that sometimes you fail to live up to them. This is normal, and not necessarily hypocritical.

The motto of my school is IN GLADIO VERITAS: Truth is in the Sword. Truth is the fundamental core value around which my school was built. This means that when a person is wrong, even the illustrious founder, any student can and should point it out. It means that when the research develops and we find out that we are doing something that is not according to the book, we change it.

It also means that it doesn’t matter who is saying it. The greenest beginner can point out inconsistencies and are encourage to do so from the first day. We show them the Book (usually Fiore’s Il Fior di Battaglia, but whichever source our practice is based on that day) and tell them that if the instructor says one thing, and the book another, they should ask why- and that sometimes the instructor will deliberately do something differently, to see if they are paying attention.

It’s useful to remember that even people you don’t like, or who clearly don’t like you, are not always wrong. It’s natural to discount the views of people you find unpleasant, or with whom you have a poor history, but they are sometimes right nonetheless.

But I’ll bet you anything you like that there have been times when I (and no doubt other instructors within the school) have failed to live up to that. That’s ok. We are human. You are too.

It is very useful to get in touch with your core values, and model your behaviour around them. But be prepared for the times when you will fail, and do not let them discourage you. You don’t lose by falling, you win by getting back up.

One of the best things Neal Stephenson ever wrote, I think, is from The Diamond Age in which Major Napier and Finkle-McGraw (or His Grace Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, to give him his full name) discuss hypocrisy with Mr. Hackworth, one of the main protagonists in the book. The Diamond Age doesn’t have a table of contents so I can’t give you the chapter, but it’s on pages 189-192 of my 500 page paperback edition. I’m tempted to type the whole thing out here, but better not— I know Neal wouldn’t mind but his publishers might. The conversation is Finkle-McGraw and Napier’s ever-so-delicate way of letting Hackworth know that they know he has apparently fallen short of the Victorian ideals that he strives towards. The conclusion (from the point of view of the discussion of morality) is this passage, in which Finkle McGraw says:

“No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved—the missteps we make along the way—are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”