(NB: I had a fencing substack before it was cool! — ed.) First, a note: If you submit a comment and it does not post, please email me at otownes AT gmail DOT com and let me know. About the blog: This blog began as a series of e-mails to help train my local SCA rapier […]
Archive for November 2015
The New-ish Justification for Existence 9 comments
Agrippa Part 3: The Controversial Lunge 13 comments
The presence of a lunge in Agrippa’s system is a somewhat controversial topic. One of the earliest historical fencing scholars, Edgarton Castle noted in his 1885 book, Schools and Masters of Fence from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, that while some of the positions shown in Agrippa’s manuals appeared to be lunges, that the development […]
Deconstructing Defeat 10 comments
I went to KWAR! Some observations: C&T melee is the best (but we already knew that) Rapier spears are problematic (but we already knew that) If you don’t wear a white scarf in a foreign kingdom, people assume you’re a goob until you prove otherwise (but we mostly already knew that) Sport fencers seem to […]
The Nature of (Historical Fencing) Knowledge: 2 comments
My recent efforts to decipher Agrippa’s fencing manual has me thinking a lot about the types of evidence that are available to us as historical fencing scholars. As students of historical European martial arts, we are faced with the challenge of attempting to recreate techniques that have been out of use for 500 years or more […]
More Thoughts on HEMA Tournaments 27 comments
Swordfish 2015, the premier HEMA event in the world, happened on Halloween weekend. As always, the amount of actual HEMA that showed up was variable. Longsword was kinda beautiful. Rapier and dagger, on the other hand … well, you be the judge: Let’s start with the acknowledgement that HEMA tournaments aren’t trying to be a […]