The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

Giganti introduces his defensive secondaries (buckler, targa, and rotella) by saying there’s no difference between them and dagger.  “Anything you have learned with the sword and dagger can be accomplished with the sword and rotella/targa/buckler.”  Which means if you’re using them differently, you’re doing something wrong.  Probably, you’re thinking you can offend with the dagger […]

Giganti’s standard policy is to win the fight outside of measure or as you come to measure.  Everything after that is just pushing your sword through your opponent.  Coming to grips, then, shouldn’t happen unless somebody did something wrong.  I think I’ll repeat that: Coming to grips shouldn’t happen unless somebody did something wrong. Giganti […]

Whoever wishes to be accomplished in this profession needs to understand not only how to move well, parry correctly, and control the sword.  He must also understand how to evade thrusts with his body. Giganti illustrates and explains four voids against thrusts in the Second Book (though he only calls two of them voids) and […]

Giganti devotes two sets of plates to what he describes as “furious passes” but which seem more likely to be the combination of a passing step that flows into a lunge (the passing lunge or pass-lunge) that shows up on the SCA list so very often.  The big advantage to the passing lunge, and why […]

I often remark that Giganti leaves nuance aside (having addressed theory sufficiently in the first six pages of his first book) and just tells you what to do.  His section on attacking with passing steps starts with the same approach: “If your enemy attacks… you can pass with your foot if you know how to […]

Between the sections on defense against cuts and the use of passing steps in a fight, Giganti pauses to include a “preface<sic> to the reader on the nature of cuts”.  It’s three pages, with no plates, but does set forth two pieces of advice. The first is that cuts are not good contratempo responses to […]

Giganti’s system for defense against low-line cuts is fairly simple, though laid out over three plates mostly for reinforcement. As he instructs in his first book, the best defense is to stab your opponent in the face as he primes the cut.  This works when your sword is not already engaged, so in his second […]

Giganti offers a second defensive alternative to cuts against the head roughly described as “don’t be there”.  In contrast to the parries, the void leaning backwards provides for two responses, one a bit more contratempo than the other. Both options proceed from the void. Against either the mandritto or the roverscio, simply lean your torso […]

Through his first four plates (and a fifth plate embedded later on, in the section on passing steps), Giganti lays out his method for defending against cuts to your head or upper body with the sword or sword and dagger.  In the first book his responses were either to lunge in the tempo of their […]

Three years after working through Tom Leoni’s Venetian Rapier, his translation of Nicoletto Giganti’s first book, Piermarco Terminiello and Joshua Pendragon (really, people are still named Pendragon, isn’t that awesome?) have discovered, translated, and published The ‘Lost’ Second Book of Nicoletto Giganti (1608). Their introductions are fascinating, and an excellent testimony to the fact that […]