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Hi!

I spent the last weekend of August at Swords of the Renaissance (my fourth time at this jewel of an event). It was a delight from start to finish, as expected! I taught three classes: “Attack with Capoferro”, which included a lengthy digression into how to hold the sword properly, “Lessons from Vadi”, which included an overview of Vadi’s movement mechanics, and various ways to set up the basic plays, and a short breakout session on “Boredom and Frustration”, basically how to retain your students by teaching them to train at the optimal rate of failure.

There was a bit of a technical glitch with the video recordings, so only my Vadi class was recorded properly. It’s in the Medieval Combat space in Swordpeople.com.

The organisers of the event thought it would be cool to premiere all the class videos on sword people, so we also have Vera Martocchia’s sidesword class, Emilia Skirmuntt’s rapier class, and Jack Parkinson’s Thibault rapier class videos up in the Renaissance Combat space. At the moment these are exclusive to Sword People, so you’ll have to log in there to see them.

I was expecting to get a bunch of fencing done, but it turned out too many students had too many questions. Fortunately, I actually enjoy teaching at least as much as I enjoy fencing, so no harm done!

Speaking of social media, I ran a bit of an experiment on Facebook last week. I’ve been thinking about the basic problem that Facebook is a disaster-zone designed to steal your attention and sell it to advertisers… and that’s where most HMA folk hang out. I posted this:

In a couple of days that post got over 5,000 views and over 140 comments.

So I posted an announcement about the pre-orders for From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Dagger Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi.

That got under 900 views and no comments.

I commented on this phenomenon, and that post got nearly 2,000 views and a bunch of comments.

In a perfect world the 2,000+ sword friends I have on FB would decamp to Swordpeople, and run all their HMA stuff there. So I could delete my FB account and move on with my life. But that isn’t going to happen, so I need to put that account to work, gently reminding folk regularly about the green fields and well-stocked bars at Swordpeople.com, and letting them know with more carefully under-the-algorithmic-radar posts about new books and other cool stuff. Turns out you can’t direct message 2000 people at once on FB (and fair enough, actually).

On the Podcast: Roland Allen: The Notebook and a Zibaldone Salad

Roland Allen is the author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. (Which I raved about in this newsletter back in January). The book is about the development of the notebook (i.e. a book you write in yourself) in European history, and it covers everything from the development of paper as a cheaper thing to write on than vellum, to wax tablets, to Italian accounting practices, to Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks, to Darwin, to the modern Moleskine and where it actually comes from.

In our conversation we talk about the means, motive and opportunity that enabled Roland to write The Notebook, and the challenges of covering such an enormous topic: what had to be left out; and the power of holding a grudge. There’s also great advice for anyone writing any sort of book about how to incorporate cause and effect into your storytelling. Readers need reasons and consequences to stay engaged.

We talk about Roland’s favourite genre of notebook, the zibaldone, which existed in medieval Florence as a way for people to write down all the bits of literature they liked, local songs, recipes, events – anything notable was written down in a hodgepodge paper version of a mixtape. To connect this to fencing, it is similar to one of our oldest treatises, Manuscript 3227a, also known as the Döbringer manuscript. This is basically a zibaldone, with a section in it on fighting with a longsword. But it also has sections in it on other things like fireworks and recipes. There’s lots else to talk about, including our preferred brands of notebook, and our favourite paper.

And finally: Quitting at the top of your game?

Don’t worry, I’m not about to hang up my swords and retire. But Alison Balsom, perhaps the greatest classical trumpeter of her generation, is. At 46. I wrote a very short blog post about it here. It’s got me thinking…

cheers,

Guy

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P.S. just a reminder: you can pre-order From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The Dagger Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi now!