Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi's Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.
Do you want to be Active and Firm on Your Legs?
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Hi! I’ve been mad about smallsword since the nineties, and for the last five months I’ve been returned to my first historical fencing love, Domenico Angelo’s School of Fencing (1787), transcribing the text and preparing it for modern students. Every martial art is a way of moving and a set of tactical preferences. The tactical preferences require safety equipment and a training partner, but you can train the way of moving alone, with little or no gear. So I’ve decided to teach a live online class exploring the mechanical foundations of Angelo’s method. And yes, Angelo does have a chapter entitled "Method and Effectual Means to Render a Fencer Active and Firm on his Legs, and to Show Him How to Recover After the Delivery of a Thrust Either Tierce or Carte", and yes, we will cover it. You can sign up below to get the 20 page class handout, which includes the relevant images and text from The School of Fencing, plus the links to the zoom meetings. I'll also email out the zoom links to all attendees on the day. Foundations of Smallsword: The Mechanics of Domenico Angelo’s School of Fencing This class is designed for solo practice. No partner is required (or previous experience: beginners are welcome!). You’ll need a smallsword, or a French-grip foil, but if all you have is a table knife, that’s fine. In fact I recommend you bring one, I’ll show you how to practise your smallsword guard positions while sitting at dinner. We’ll cover all or most of the following:
The class will conclude with a live Q&A session. Format:
To make the class accessible across time zones, I will teach it twice: Saturday July 4th, 7pm UK time (Europe and the Americas) Sunday July 11th, 8am UK time (Europe and Australasia) Register once and attend either session or both. Or just watch the recording. Everyone registered will receive recordings of both classes. I’ve never in my life taught the exact same class twice, so while the sessions will cover the same basic material, there will be significant differences. Places are available here:
I hope you’ll join me! it will be fun. yours, Guy |
Guy Windsor's Swordschool
Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi's Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.
BOOKS PODCAST COURSES COMMUNITY BLOG Hi! If you’ve been following along with the websites debacle, you can probably imagine what my week has been like. I didn’t start teaching historical martial arts for a living because I wanted to become a website manager. The infrastructure matters, of course. Good web design matters too. A badly-made website can ruin your day if you rely on it for something important (I’m looking at you, every government website I’ve ever encountered). The redirect links...
Hi! Yesterday I emailed to let you know that guywindsor dot net and swordschool dot com were temporarily taken offline while we recover from a serious security incident. In the short term both those urls now redirect to swordschool.shop, where there’s a blog post explaining the situation. Thank you for all the kind messages, they’ve been much appreciated. I’ve put together a temporary solution for one of the biggest problems: the redirect links used throughout my books. Many of my books and...
Hi You may have noticed that my websites guywindsor.net and swordschool.com are currently down. This is thanks to a malicious code attack on my wife’s website that is hosted on the same servers, which we are working to fix. This means that those sites will be down for a while, I don’t know how long. During that time all the redirect links (especially to videos) you'll find in my books won’t work. Fortunately they are only redirects: the video hosting platform I use (Vimeo) is unaffected. If...