The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

Dante’s devised this scheme to re-focus the local Italianate fencers on the fundamentals of theory and form instead of plate replication.  The textbook for the experiment would be Leoni’s Fabris, which we all have access to.  The available guards were limited to extended quarta for single sword, and a withdrawn terza for dagger.

Reading:
Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17
Dagger work pages 83-92

Guards:
Plate 14, 60

I realize that a lot of the intro stuff is old hat, but please reread
it with an eye to culling out anything from your prior knowledge that
isn’t present in that material.

The two plates offer one guard for single sword, and one for sword and
dagger. I consider anything that you can execute from either of these
guards to be fair game for the purposes of this experiment as long as
the initial moment of stillness is one of those two positions. I chose
ones that are versatile enough to cover the inside and outside lines,
as well as use the lunge, the pass, and the girata.

As you fence, be sure to stay in one of those two guards. During the
course of your bouts, please pay attention to how you react to your
opponents (other people will need to be your test subjects, though the
Giganti adherents can do that job as well if need be) and consider if
those reactions are in keeping with the theory, or in violation. The
goal should be to whittle down to being 100% in keeping with the
theory, and applying it however is useful from either guard at a given
moment. It that happens to mean a passing step, sword beat, and a
dagger in the groin right then, go for it.

I will need each of you to do some form of moderate journaling in the
form of “X is the ideal. I did X-N. I can make the value of N smaller
by…” This can be broad, specific, or some mixture of the two. I’d like
to get biweekly reports, though these don’t need to be terribly
elaborate.

Reports, thoughts, and progress will appear here as they occur.