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Guy's Blog

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

Category: Books and Writing

It’s always the way. You bring out a new book, and somebody comes up with something that makes you jump up and down going “I wanted that in my book!!! Why couldn’t that have come out a month ago!!!”

It’s actually a good feeling. Because no book is the last word on any subject, and no non-fiction book is ever truly finished (which is why we have second editions, third editions, etc etc.).

You may have heard that I’m into bookbinding. I got into bookbinding while I was researching Vadi, and came across the auction house catalogue for the sale of the manuscript to the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma. The catalogue included a collation of the manuscript, which is a description of the way the pages are bound together. It’s extremely important because it can give you a great deal of insight into what might be missing from the manuscript. I’ve written about that here.

So a couple of weeks after my new Fiore book came out, Mike Chidester (who was one of the inspirations for the book) sends me this email:

A few weeks ago, while trying to do preparatory work on the second facsimile project, I ran into problems with the Getty museum on the subject of how many pages are missing from their online offerings. The reproductions department sent me six scans (the inside and outside covers and one flyleaf) and swore blind that that was all of the missing pages. I was pretty sure that was wrong, and ultimately my questions were bounced to the manuscript department, which sent me this arcane formula:

This is an example of a collation statement, which tries to capture the exact way in which the manuscript is bound together. Manuscripts are built up out of quires, which are stacks of paper that are folded in half and then sewn down the middle, so that each sheet (bifolium) becomes two pages (folia). Medieval manuscripts are often bound in quires of 4 (quaternions), which is the number of parchment sheets of roughly A4 size that you can expect to harvest from a single goat. The number actually typically ranges from 3-5 (ternions to quinternions), because perfect plans rarely survive contact with reality.

The Getty manuscript is a normal-seeming manuscript of 49 numbered folia, so one might expect 7 quaternions (for 56 total folia), with several blank pages at the beginning or end. Instead, when I created a visualization of this diagram (inspired by work I've seen Daniel Jaquet and others do), it turned out like this:

Two single bifolia bound into the spine, and then a series of very large quires—quinternions and a sexternion. What's more, any student of Fiore knows that folio 38, which contains dagger plays, is misplaced; specifically, it belongs between folia 14 and 15, which are the end of quire III and the beginning of IV. Since folio 27 is also bound into the book as a single leaf, we can surmise that 27 and 38 were originally a single bifolium, forming the outside layer of quire IV—making it a septernion, or seven-sheet quire. At the time, I thought that this was a ridiculous number of pages for a manuscript quire. What little I knew. (Excerpt reproduced with permission. Personal correspondence, May 27th 2020).

Finally, finally, finally, we have a collation statement for Il Fior di Battaglia. And the mystery of how folio 38 ended up where it did is solved. It used to be the first page of the next quire, and at some point the vellum tore along its fold, the pages fell out, and what should be folio 15 got bound back in in the wrong place. That binder needs a good slap round the back of the head, of course. But it’s always a relief to get confirmation of a theory. Until now, there was no way to be certain beyond all doubt that the naughty folio 38 wasn’t in fact in its original place (if, for instance, it appeared in the middle of an intact quire), and Fiore just decided to strip a page of dagger plays and dump them between the pollax and the spear plays. 

O happy day, calloo callay! But now of course I have to edit the introduction section of From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice.

Not this year though. 

If I had to identify a single moment where I became irreversibly a Star Wars fan, it was when Luke Skywalker use the plank he was supposed to walk off on Jabba's barge as a springboard for a somersault, while R2D2 shoots his lightsaber into the air for him to catch. The closest thing we have in the historical record to a lightsaber is a longsword, and while I had all sorts of perfectly rational reasons for making longsword my primary focus, really, it's because it's a lightsaber that hasn't been turned on yet.

So there you have it. It's probably true to say that without Star Wars there'd be no Swordschool.

I've written reviews in the past about various Star Wars films: most notably The Force Awakens and have given  some thought to the new franchise. It's a very long way though from Jedi magic to serious scholarship on historical fencing manuscripts. What tends to happen is that the gleeful zeal which these texts light up in us sword nuts gets ground down by the nitty-gritty serious work of approaching centuries-old documents and teasing their meanings out of them in an academically supportable way.

What I have tried to do with my new book is keep hold of that child-like enthusiasm, because frankly, it's what we're all in this for. I think there is really no need for the defensive use of detached academese. So long as every assertion of fact is supported by evidence, and every unsupported opinion is flagged up as such, there's no advantage to be gained from writing a book about the specifics of medieval knightly combat in a tone that only a trained academic is comfortable reading.

The first review of the book (by the excellent Vojkan Selakovic, on Goodreads) suggests that the book is working as intended. He wrote:

The book From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore Dei Liberi is, from my humble and inevitably limited experience, one of the most relevant books on historical swordsmanship that any practicioner, whether (aspiring) instructor or student can own. Particularly those focusing on Fiore. This was an ”all killer no filler” from Guy, obviously an experienced swordsman but an excellent tutor as well.

The book starts with a welcoming summary of various translations, and insight into the life and historical context of Fiore. Those with a particular fancy for the historical part of historical swordsmanship will be quite pleased and given enough guidelines for further research.

The core of the book itself is the Fiore's early 15th c manuscript Fiore di Battaglia, everyone who picked up this book is probably well acquainted with. However, rather than just a translation (which is by no means a minor task, on the contrary) of the sword plays – this is a proper, in depth analysis. A systematic, meticulous dissecting of Fiore's work.

No matter how slow you advance in this art, and how meticulous you are, unless you have vast experience behind you, interpreting medieval source and trying to ‘bring it to life' in practice will cause problems. There will be gaps in your understanding of this as you stretch your capabilities . The book is there to help you fill out these holes and complete your project. Sometimes, it's a sentence, sometimes a paragraph and sometimes a whole page, but there will be many ”aha” moments, even for those who aren't new to this. Fiore isn't as linear as we are used to in a ‘step by step guideline' era, so hearing from someone who is intimately familiar with all this and who dealt with the same problems we are having, is invaluable. His interpretation of Posta di Bicorno is the illustrative example. Through Guy's work, this book in particular, I've learned to ”read” Fiore in a different way, both the words and the pictures.

In this I applaud to Guy. He didn't invent the wheel with this book, he didn't make a breakthrough discovery, he simply (and I guess it wasn't simple at all) combined all the available knowledge on Fiore in a very digestible, practically useful and applicable form.

I was a bit disappointed when I realised I've reached the end of the book in what seems to have been just a couple of hours. And I really love it when a book makes me feel like that.

We needed this book.

If you don't have it yet, From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi can be ordered from your local bookseller (use the isbn: hardback: 978-952-7157-54-1 paperback: 978-952-7157-55-8), if you prefer ebooks you can get it direct from me here, or if your best option is the world’s longest river, you can get it there too. Amazon US, Amazon UK.

As with my Solo course, if you need a copy of the book but can't afford it at the moment, email me and I'll send you a pdf free. No questions asked. These are not easy times for anyone.

Happy May Day! I know it’s not such a big deal in many countries, but in Finland it’s HUGE. So what better day to launch a new book? Especially when everyone is stuck at home.

From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi is officially published today! You can order it from your local bookseller (use the isbn: hardback: 978-952-7157-54-1 paperback: 978-952-7157-55-8), if you prefer ebooks you can get it direct from me here, or if your best option is the world’s longest river, you can get it there too. Amazon US, Amazon UK.

I guess the question is why would you want to? Well, the book is an in-depth look at my interpretation of Fiore’s longsword material, on foot out of armour. It includes a transcription and translation of all of the longsword plays, with extensive digressions into the other sections. And most critically, every play is illustrated with a video clip (there are links in the text that you can click on in the ebooks, or type into a browser in the printed book). This is an innovative way to produce a critical study of a martial arts text, and I’m looking forward to finding out what you think of it.

If you have already read it, I’d very much appreciate a review! It’s currently languishing in algorithm hell, reviewless. Tell the world what you think of it!

The official blurb:

In the late 14th century Fiore dei Liberi, an Italian knightly combat master, wrote a magnificent treatise on the Art of Arms. He called his book Il Fior di Battaglia, the Flower of Battle, and it is one of the greatest martial arts books of all time, describing how to fight on foot and on horseback, in armour and without, with sword, spear, pollax, dagger, or with no weapon at all. Guy Windsor has spent the last 20 years studying Fiore's work and creating a modern practice of historical swordsmanship from it. In this book, Guy takes you through all of Fiore's longsword techniques on foot out of armour. Each technique (or “play”) is shown with the drawing from the treatise, Guy's transcription and translation of the text, his commentary on how it fits into the system and works in practice, and a link to a video of the technique as Guy interprets it. The book contains a detailed introduction describing Fiore's life and times, and extensive discussion of the contexts in which Fiore's art belongs.

This is essential reading for any scholar of the Art of Arms, and will also provide fascinating insight to all martial artists and historians of the medieval and early Renaissance eras.

So, if that sounds like your sort of thing, order it from your local bookseller (use the isbn: hardback: 978-952-7157-54-1 paperback: 978-952-7157-55-8), or get the ebook direct from me here, or even Amazon US, Amazon UK.

P.S. I made a mistake in the Gumroad settings, and quite a few direct buyers ended up paying for shipping on the ebook. I've now fixed that, and contacted the buyers regarding refunding the shipping costs. If you were one of them and you didn't get an email from me, please check your spam folder, and drop me a line!

In a sword fight there is no time to think. You see, you act. The essence of training is to adjust your instinct so that the instinctive response is also the correct one. I’ve spent decades training my instinct, and  I apply this to literally all parts of my life. I don’t decide what to do when I get up in the morning, and I certainly don’t plan my week/month/year. I do whatever my gut tells me is the right thing, and figure out why afterwards.

I’m spending a lot of time in my shed at the moment. Not to get away from the wife and kids- in fact the best times are when one or other of them join me, and sit in the chair I keep there for the purpose chatting to me while I chisel. Or when my youngest is cutting stuff up on the bandsaw, just for fun. I’ve completed the major project I was working on (a Pilates ladder barrel for my wife), and have spent almost all my time in there since re-organising my tools and making better tool storage solutions, such as this saw till.

Please note, I should probably be doing that sabre video class for the Solo course, but I’m not. I will, but not until my instinct tells me it’s time. I wondered why I was spending so much time out in my shed, and eventually it came to me. This is a period where the normal illusion of control (I can go here, I can do that) has been stripped away. We actually have exactly the same degree of agency we’ve always had, but as good citizens we are deciding to obey the government guidelines and stay home (yes really please do). The environment seems stranger and more hostile than usual, and it makes us feel helpless. So I have been spending my time in an environment I can control, and exerting that control in a clear and obvious way by making things, particularly things that change that environment for the better. This is the linear opposite of stressing about the plague. 

When I figured that out, I thought “good job, brain! nice one” and carried on making this:

Here it is from another angle.

What the hell is that? I hear you ask. Well now…

I don’t know if you have ever written a book. I have, several in fact. And every single one is like being constipated for a year or more, before finally it forces its way painfully out, and you lie spent from the struggle clutching this thing you’ve made. I should probably have written ‘pregnant’ for ’constipated’, but I was present for the birth of my children, and actually, giving birth seems to be orders of magnitude harder than producing a book. 

My latest extrusion is done and dusted, and the hardback pre-orders have been sent out. Hurrah!

In it I take you through all of Fiore's longsword techniques on foot out of armour. Each play is shown with the drawing from the treatise, my transcription and translation of the text that goes with it, my commentary on how it fits into the system and works in practice, and a link to a video of the technique as I interpret it. The book contains a detailed introduction describing Fiore's life and times, and extensive discussion of the contexts in which Fiore's art belongs.

You can get the ebook (in all formats) from my gumroad shop here: https://gum.co/longsword1

It’s available to pre-order from Amazon in any one of their national stores, just search for its ASIN: B08629VNKY

But before you go dashing off to buy it: it’s Fiore sword geekery in the extreme. Please ONLY buy it if you are really into the historical side of historical swordsmanship, and/or you want to know how I think Fiore’s art is put together. This is not a basic introduction to how to hold a sword.

Or you can get the ebook for free… if you can tell me what the object pictured above is for, let me know in the comments, and the first correct answer will get the ebook. Note, that the object is lying on my bench, and may or may not be correctly rotated in the images.

I will also give out a free ebook to the best answer, correct or not!

I will post a picture of the object in service, and the best answer(s) next week.

Producing a book is a marathon, not a sprint, but the finish line for From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi is in sight!

I’m in my study plodding through the first draft of the the laid-out print file. This is simultaneously very exciting (my NEW BOOK! HURRAH!), very nerve wracking (I’ve got to find EVERY error!), and very tedious (I’ve got to go through every page with a fine-tooth comb. For instance, in the bibliography I had the publication year for Domenico Angelo’s School of Fencing wrong. Doh!). This is simultaneously the best and worst part of publishing: the best because you can see that the book is real, not just a thing in your head; the worst because the temptation to rush through the last few hurdles is extreme. 

I have Basil Poledouris’ soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian on repeat coming in through my noise-cancelling headphones. This helps.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

In the late 14th century Fiore dei Liberi, an Italian knightly combat master, wrote a magnificent treatise on the Art of Arms. He called his book Il Fior di Battaglia, the Flower of Battle, and it is one of the greatest martial arts books of all time, describing how to fight on foot and on horseback, in armour and without, with sword, spear, pollax, dagger, or with no weapon at all. Guy Windsor has spent the last 20 years studying Fiore's work and creating a modern practice of historical swordsmanship from it. In this book, Guy takes you through all of Fiore's longsword techniques on foot out of armour. Each technique (or “play”) is shown with the drawing from the treatise, Guy's transcription and translation of the text, his commentary on how it fits into the system and works in practice, and a link to a video of the technique as Guy interprets it. The book contains a detailed introduction describing Fiore's life and times, and extensive discussion of the contexts in which Fiore's art belongs.

This is essential reading for any scholar of the Art of Arms, and will also provide fascinating insight to all martial artists and historians of the medieval and early Renaissance eras.

What do you think?

I don’t have a draft of the cover yet, but my friend Siobhan Richardson is starring in the image above (by Dahlia Katz) for it. I think it looks fantastic, and really tells the story of the book.

Staring at the pages of the new book means that I will soon also be staring at the bills coming in from my editor (Andrew Chapman) and my layout artist (Bek Pickard). Both these fine humans totally deserve to be paid for their work. And of course they will be no matter what – I would never stiff a freelancer.

I used to crowdfund my books through Indiegogo to cover the costs before publication. I don’t do that any more because the platform fees are rather high, and they also tend to hold onto the money for weeks. Instead, for the last couple of books I’ve taken limited pre-orders for the hardback, through my Gumroad account. It’s much more efficient- I get paid at the end of the following week, and the platform fees are way lower. I’ve set it up to allow maximum 75  pre-orders.

If you pre-order the hardback I can’t guarantee that it will be faster than ordering it through your usual bookshop (online or bricks-and-mortar) when it's released, because sometimes the shipping takes forever. But you will get immediate access to a pdf of the current draft (no images, but the video links all work), the ebook version the moment it's ready, and your book will printed and shipped before the book goes into general distribution. 

So, if you would like to order one or more copies of the new book, go here! https://gum.co/longsword

I’m in that funny limbo state between a book being finished and being published. My translation and interpretation of Fiore’s longsword plays (of which the current working title is now From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Longsword Plays of Fiore dei Liberi. What do you think?) is back from the editor, his 2,370 comments and changes accepted, rejected, or otherwise acted on (that number is exact, not figurative. 2,370. Really. That's normal for a good editor with a 65,000 word document) and the resulting draft is now being proof-read. I expect that back in a couple of weeks, then it’ll be off to layout. Hurrah!

So it's a Schrödinger’s book, both finished and not finished. Done and not done. I can’t really concentrate on another sword related writing project (I think the replacement volume for The Duellist’s Companion is next up) until this one is really done. Instead I’m doing some productive procrastination, which for me is usually some craft-related activity. It’s something of a relief to get away from ideas and pixels, and back to physical materials. I’m making bookcases. This one is basically done:

That’s 18mm birch ply with solid cherry banding, and adjustable shelves, held onto the wall with a French cleat.

I haven’t done the cap or base yet, because I’m concentrating on getting books out of boxes. I can add the decorative but not actually necessary elements later. Bookcase 2 is basically the same, but with maple accents. I’ve been using the kiridashi knives daily since I made them– and holy cow, they are beautiful tools. They led me to dust off a chip-carving knife I’ve had knocking about the workshop for maybe 6 years. I got JT Pälikkö to make the blade for me, and I stuck a crappy birch handle on it just to get it into use asap. But I haven’t used it nearly as much as the quality of the blade deserves, which is partly because the handle just wasn’t appealing. So in some down-time between bookcases, while all my clamps were occupied with a glue-up, I started re-shaping the handle. After five minutes I thought ‘you know what? This knife deserves better’, and stripped off the old handle, and made a new one out of maple, cherry, and walnut. You can see part of the old handle in this photo.

Top tip: leave the wood long as long as possible- it's much easier to hold it still if it has a built-in handle! I epoxied the whole thing together.


Then I did 90% of the shaping before cutting the handle to length. I went so far as to actually finish the handle at the blade end before cutting the waste away.

The handle is finished in boiled linseed oil, then shellac. I made a home for it on my tool board- it fits in beautifully!

Of course, in my enthusiasm, I drilled the hole for the tang too deep, and it was visible at the pommel end, so I plugged it with a square cherry plug. I could have made it disappear with some antique-restorer trickery, but decided to highlight the error with a contrasting wood.

This is in the spirit of wabi-sabi: the things that make something imperfect can also make them beautiful. This is true in many fields, but not, ever, book editing!

A month ago I posted about Invisible Women, and suggested changing the cover of my book The Medieval Longsword to make  it more inclusive, and especially to make it clear that women can and should practice the art of arms if they so wish.

Shortly after that the socialz exploded with backlash against the dimwitted Andrew Klavan suggesting in his review of the tv show Witcher that ‘women can't fight with swords'. Yes, he's a moron and safely ignored, but it goes to show that the idea that women can't fight with swords remains plausible to many people.

So, here's the first draft of the new cover, with Kimberleigh Roseblade (photographed by Kristin Reimer of Photomuse) holding a sword in defiance of the Klavans of this world:

What do you think? Let me know if you have any suggestions on improving it in the comments on this blog, or contact me directly.

I'm planning to update the cover of Advanced Longsword too, but one thing at a time!

My next longsword book is with the editor at the moment. Currently titled The Longsword of Fiore dei Liberi, it's my transcription, translation, and commentary on all the longsword plays on foot out of armour from Il Fior di Battaglia. It includes video clips of my interpretation of all of those plays, starting from drawing the sword, and ending just after the zogho stretto section. The Medieval Longsword is a training manual, which teaches you how to use the sword. This new book is more of a description of what Fiore's plays are and how they fit together. In a sane world this book would have preceded the others, but to be honest the idea for it didn't occur to me until about 16 months ago!

I'm not happy with the title though. I need something that may attract readers who don't know who Fiore was. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Medieval Italian Swordsmanship: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi

What do you think? Do you have any better ideas for the title? You can let me know in the comments on this blog, or or contact me directly.

As always, feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested.

I’m reading Invisible Women: Exposing Gender Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, and it’s one of those books that simply everybody on the planet ought to read. The raging unfairness she exposes has made me rethink a lot of things. It’s not like I was unaware of what was going on, exactly, but as Perez points out the bias is so pervasive, and of such long standing, that one tends not to notice it. As she writes on page xi, “the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.”
And this silence is literally fatal. To take some incontrovertible examples out of the dozens and dozens and dozens in the book:

  • From Chapter 9: A Sea of Dudes: “When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die.” (p.186) Car safety tests are routinely carried out with crash test dummies based on the ‘average male’. When cars are tested with dummies designed to represent female physiques, they will often get a much lower safety rating than the one the makers publish. Leaving women out of car safety testing is literally killing women.
  • From Chapter 10: The Drugs Don’t Work: “Women are dying. And the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.” (p. 216) It turns out that most medical research is conducted on male subjects (animal and human), because women have more complex biology (all those pesky hormonal cycles interfering with nice clean data). Which means that nobody actually knows how drugs will affect women, and even drugs intended solely for female medical issues are often only tested on male subjects!
  • In Chapter 11: The Yentl Syndrome, Perez tells us that women are more likely to die from heart attacks than men, because they present differently in women. Women are 50% more likely to have their heart attack misdiagnosed, which can obviously be fatal (p. 218).

And so women are dying. Yes, it’s more difficult to develop drugs using female subjects, but it was also very difficult to fly to the moon, and we managed that 50 years ago. Leaving women out of car design and medical research is literally killing women.

This holds true in practically every domain, from public transport, public services, aid work, architecture, politics, town planning, the list goes on and on. Did you know that after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake disaster, which killed thousands, and destroyed 400,000 homes, there was a massive rebuilding effort. And they built replacement homes without kitchens. Because cooking is women’s work, and nobody asked the women what they wanted in their new houses. Then the same thing happened again after the 2004 tsunami. Massive rebuilding effort, no kitchens. Seriously. It’s fucking insane.

Invisible Women is 300+ pages of well-researched, entirely data-supported examples of the way women are systematically overlooked, under-represented, and disadvantaged. Buy it. You can find it here (that's an affiliate link, as are all book links on my blog btw. Use google instead if that makes you uncomfortable)

As a father of daughters, this incites an existential rage in me that I will not contain. But how to direct it? “One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate.” (p. xii). Who is this enemy attacking my children? Based on reading Perez’s work, I think it’s an emergent property of the assumptions and practices of our culture.

I was talking about this book with some friends on my recent trip to New Zealand. I was about 150 pages in at that point, and Agate Ponder-Sutton who was sitting next to me is a) a data scientist and b) had read the whole book. But when she started talking about it, one of the other people present, without malice or bad intent, effectively told her to stop talking so I could explain the book. The one that I hadn’t finished yet and don’t have the technical background to assess with anything like the same authority.
That’s the problem, right there.

So what to do?
Perez suggests (on p. 316) that “we must increase female representation in all spheres of life”, and (on p. 318) “The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten.” I think she’s right.

The historical martial arts community has come a long way since the early nineties, but women remain severely under-represented. By far the most inclusive event I know, Swordsquatch, held in Seattle every September, had a total of forty instructors. 12 were women, so about 30%. And that’s outstandingly good in comparison to last year’s VISS, which had two out of 15, about 12%. This year’s WMAW had one woman out of 26. That’s about 4%. No disrespect to any of these events intended- many events have no female instructors at all.
I’ll consider this topic done when the norm for events worldwide is 50:50.

The usual objection to this idea is “but there aren’t enough female instructors of the necessary standard”. The historical martial arts movement was overwhelmingly male 25 years ago. The female instructors we do have can pretty much all point to one or more male instructors who trained them (most famously perhaps Jessica Finley started out as Christian Tobler’s student. Hats off to Christian for doing an excellent job there). But the fact that after 25 years at this we don’t have approximately equal numbers of male and female international level instructors is a shameful failure on the part of us old guard male instructors, who could and should have done better to train up the women in our schools. And, we all got our breaks when the standards were pretty low. Guy of 2001 would never get invited to teach at an event in 2019. But because the bar was lower then I got fantastically valuable experience, and very useful exposure. Teaching at prestigious events is a massively effective learning opportunity for the instructors, and having more women teaching will encourage more women to teach. Yes, we do have a few female instructors on the international circuit that are every bit the equals and peers of us well-established men. But we need more, and we’ll only get them by giving teaching opportunities to women who are currently less well qualified than the superstars. We have to accept a short-term disadvantage (classes from less experienced, less well-known instructors) for a long-term advantage: doubling the size of the pool from which instructors can be drawn. And we may very well find that that ‘disadvantage' is no such thing- I pale to think at how much we may be missing by overlooking the women we already have in the field.

In the tiny sphere of life in which I have some influence, there are already many people working hard to address our inherent bias. Kaja Sadowski’s book Fear is the Mind-Killer is a great place to start looking at making training better adapted to individual students. Kaja also kindly read and commented on my first rage-fuelled rant draft of this post. This one is much better.

The Esfinges group exists to support women training in historical martial arts.

This post by Jennifer Landels on how to adapt your curriculum for gender differences is very useful: http://jmlandels.stiffbunnies.com/2019/05/teaching-every-body-adapting-your-curriculum-for-gender-differences/

Fran Terminiello runs events with women-only instructors in the UK. There are two coming up in 2020: By The Sword 2020, March 28th and 29th, and Swords of Spring, on May 2nd. I'm sure some numbnuts will yell “that's discrimination!”, and I'll yell back “positive discrimination can be helpful!” (see here for my view on women-only events).

Most recently, The Ravenswood Academy have produced a very beautiful deck of cards featuring women warriors from across the globe. (They've sold out, or I'd link to the shop.)

On the subject of cards, my game Audatia has a female character deck based on a historical person (Lady Agnes Hotot).


In my other work I’ve always made sure that my books have female as well as male models in the photos. In my online courses I’ve done the same with my demo partners. A lot of them are about solo training, but of the three that require a training partner, two have a woman throughout: the Rapier Course has Maaret Sirkkala, and the Longsword Course had Zoë Chandler. I wasn’t aware at the time that Zoë was trans, and he is now Zach Chamberlaine, but the point stands. And I know for a sure and certain fact that it has made a difference to women taking up the art, because some of those women have told me so to my face. That’s also why my Facebook profile ‘cover photo’ is me in the middle of mostly not-white, many not male students, and standing right next to me is a woman in a hijab holding a sword (Riri Nitihardjo, from Indonesia).


Some years ago I was reading Katy Bowman’s book on biomechanics, Alignment Matters, and noticed with something of a start that it assumed a female reader. Fair enough, I thought. She’s a woman, and many of her clients are women, so why not? It didn’t bother me. Likewise, Seth Godin is well known for always using ‘she’ as the generic term. He said when asked about it on his podcast that it was in honour of his mother. Also fair enough, and it certainly causes me no pain.

So as I was reading Invisible Women I had a sudden thought. Why don’t I take my most popular book, The Medieval Longsword, and edit it such that it would assume a female reader? I had a look, and it currently addresses the reader as ‘you’, and describes the opponent as ‘opponent’, or ‘partner’, or ‘attacker’, such as here:
1. “Attacker ready in right side posta di donna; you wait in tutta porta di ferro
2. Attacker strikes with mandritto fendente, aiming at your head
3. Parry with frontale, meeting the middle of the attacker’s sword with the middle of your own, edge to flat
4. The attacker’s sword is beaten wide to your left, so pass away from it (to your right), striking with a mandritto fendente to the attacker’s left arm, and thrusting to the chest.”
There really isn’t any room for editing without making it less clear.

But I can and jolly goddesses damn well will put a woman on the cover. Currently there is me crossing swords with one of Fiore’s illustrated masters:

The Medieval Longsword

I could replace me with a woman.
Or, we could go with something a bit more dramatic and do a whole cover re-design, with something like this:


(That's Jessica Finley, in case you've been living under a rock this last ten years).
Or perhaps this image of Kimberleigh Smithbower Roseblade might hit the spot (I’m in discussions with the photographer at the moment- this is my front-runner favourite).

Kimberleigh Roseblade photograph ©Kristin Reimer/Photomuse

What do you think?

The book I’m currently working on (the finished draft of which went to the editor yesterday, huzzah!!) is the compilation of the Fiore Translation Project, so it hasn’t much room in it for changing the assumed sex of people. I pretty much only refer to Fiore (a man) and other real people (by their gender, or at least the gender they present as), or myself (also a man). I suppose I could refer to the player or companion (the one getting bashed up in the images) as ‘she’, but it would be weird because the illustration seems to show a man and every instance where Fiore uses a pronoun to describe them, it’s male. So it would be simply wrong to start calling them ‘she’, or translating it any way other than the way it was written. What do I do to make it more likely to draw women into the Art? Would this do?

Or this?

Zoe Chandler kicks Miika in the nuts: for The Swordsman's Companion.

In case it isn’t clear: if you are philosophically or politically opposed to women entering the art, you can fuck off my blog, don’t buy my books, I want nothing to do with you. If you think representation doesn’t matter, then go away more gently and get an education, then you’ll be welcome back.

If you have any good ideas about how to adapt one of my books in this way, or a book I could write from scratch with this agenda, then please let me know in the comments!

In truth, I don’t expect this to make a great deal of difference to the world at large, but I have to do something, and this might make some difference to some people. Which is much, much, better than making no difference at all.

Whenever I post on topics like this there is alway a slew of wankers who feel entitled to comment despite being entirely ignorant. Yes, it’s always men. Funny that. But to be clear: I won’t discuss this on any forum other than the comments on this blog, and, if you haven’t read Invisible Women, you are not qualified to have an opinion on it.

Radical thought, I know.

I have the best readers. They are forever coming up with great ideas that I would never have thought of myself, and then sharing them with me. For instance, a while ago, Alex Beaudet contacted me with the suggestion of creating versions of illustrated fencing treatises in the format used for the ebook version of comic books and graphic novels. This is obviously better than the standard pdf or epub because it is precisely designed for distributing books made up of image files, rather than text.

But it's something I know absolutely nothing about, so I replied along the lines of ‘great idea, but not something I can do myself'. And so Alex kindly volunteered to do it.

We started with Vadi's De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, which has come out beautifully. It's free, but feel free to pay something for it if you want to support this kind of work. You can see it for yourself here:


De Arte Gladiatoria

And we have Capoferro in the works!

You may also notice that the mailing list sign-up form below every post has changed… do you have a copy of Swordfighting yet?

If you have two hands, and only one of them is holding the sword, you might as well have a second weapon. The most common companion weapon for the rapier is the dagger. Rapier and dagger fencing is fast, complex, and fun. In this workbook you will learn how to quickly develop the knack of parrying with the dagger while striking with the sword, using a series of games. You will then be taught a selection of rapier and dagger sequences from Capoferro’s Gran Simulacro, and develop from these sequences into freeplay.

We also cover the use of the cloak as a secondary weapon, drawing from Capoferro and Alfieri, teaching you how to use the cloak to parry attacks, to weigh down your opponent’s weapon before you attack, and even to blind them prior to running them through.

These workbooks are laid out in right-handed and left-handed versions, we recommend choosing the one that suits you. All technical exercises are shown in the videos for both right-handers and left-handers. You can buy the workbook from our distribution partner Fallen Rook Press:

Right Handed Layout

Left Handed Layout

Pro tip: use the coupon code PART4 to get 25% off!

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