The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

For the last several months, Ruairc and myself have been meeting on Tuesday evenings to work through a series of fencing drills that focus on the basics of Italian fencing. We’ve made quite a bit of progress as a result, and our Tuesday evening drilling time has helped us both with figuring out how to […]

In his last four chapter Giganti still introduces new concepts, reiterates some of his old standbys, and basically keeps ploughing forward.  It’s not really a concluding section, just “More shit to do with sword and dagger.”  Still, it’s what we’ve got.  Maybe we can find catharsis in here, or maybe it’s a Beckett play.  Maybe […]

Here we have some of the few instances of duo tempi, in this case for the purposes of yielding out of range of a lunge to attack on the tempo of the recovery.  Which was, as, like, two people remember, one of the lessons we learned from advance-lunge drills a few weeks back.  Being able […]

This week was mostly taken up by a marshal’s class at practice, but we got in our Giganti, and closed out with a double bearpit.  Meanwhile, I tried to sit down to write this and got distracted watching Reclaiming the Blade, thinking “this will be cute”.  ZOMG… watch that shit! The Feint of Sword and […]

So having said, er, rather a few times that Giganti doesn’t actually bother going into specific guards but instead lays out the qualities of a good guard and lets you smart boys figure it out for yourself (a hint: If you’re dead, it was not a good guard), it’s now time to admit that Giganti […]

My sense of Giganti in these chapters is basically that he’s saying “That stuff you can do without a dagger, you can do with a dagger”.  He’s laid out his system with single sword, and the addition of a dagger changes the tools but not the principles.  I’m curious as to whether or not the […]

This is a little overdue, and we’ve slacked off on hitting the Giganti recently, though it’s coming back out at practice on Thursday (heads up, Gawin and Letia) to change that.  Having segued to dagger, then, on to the first set of dagger chapters, of the form “how to parry a thrust to the ____”.  […]

The long lost Giganti book has returned from its walk about, with a signature on the inside front cover, and now I can finally resume where we left off before Pennsic.  Having addressed the use of the single sword against single sword, Giganti now moves to the dagger.  Starting with what to do when your […]

This week brought two more voids, with an interlude of sword positioning for advantage (and that skipped page about fighting aggressive fighters) How to Parry Thrusts to the Chest with Single Sword This illustration shows you a safe way to parry thrusts to your chest and to deliver a counterthrust… in different ways; some pass […]

Giganti teaches, basically, two voids, though he breaks the Inquartat (aka demi-volte/volte) into three ways to get there.  The “scans0 della vita” of Capo Ferro shows up here for discussion at length.  His (and here I’m paraphrasing the labels provided by Dante) “strike under the sword” and “passata to the left” show up elsewhere, but […]