Hi!

The big news this week is that I have hashed out an arrangement with Freelance Academy Press, publishers of my The Medieval Dagger and The Armizare Vade Mecum, that allows me to sell all versions of these two books on my shopify store. Hurrah!

If you’re not familiar with The Armizare Vade Mecum, it’s a series of mnemonic verses for learning Fiore’s Art of Arms. It began when I was thinking about the verse structure of Fiore’s writing, and noticed that one of the paragraphs on folio 9v has about the right amount of ideas in it for a sonnet. Here’s the prose translation:

And here’s the sonnet, as laid out by the excellent Adam Velez:

If this is your jam, you’ll love the rest of the book. You can find it here:

We are currently working on getting the files ready to publish the paperback and ebook versions of The Medieval Dagger on the store too- they should be ready soon!

We are also very close to releasing the new Fiore facsimile with translation. Katie has done a stunning job on the cover: what do you think?

Cool stuff from the internet

Warriors of Ash is an HMA and Dark Ages club that lost their training space and most of their gear to Hurricane Helene. There are a couple of ways you could help them out if you’re feeling flush. They have a straightforward Go Fund Me here:

​https://www.gofundme.com/f/warriors-of-ash-helene-recovery-fund

And they are auctioning off an awesome-looking buckler and a very cool shield, here:

https://www.32auctions.com/woashields​

This week on the podcast: Russian Dissidence with Romana Shemayev

Romana Shemayev is an American songwriter and performer, translator of contemporary Russian poetry, and one of the founders of “Bent Blades, a gathering of Historical Martial Arts enthusiasts, who study German longsword fencing according to the principles of Johannes Liechtenauer.

The interview is a bit different to the usual. It starts out normally enough with background chat, and swords. But she is a translator and performer of dissident songs from the USSR, and she performs several of them for us. It’s only fair to say that the recording could be better- the perfectly fine normal podcast setup didn’t capture her guitar as well as it might. This episode was also edited together from two separate recording sessions several weeks apart, so it may be a bit less consistent than usual. The transcription isn’t perfect either! It won’t affect your understanding or enjoyment of the content though.

Also, her songs deal with some pretty intense subject matter. Going to the sauna to recover from years freezing in a gulag is not the most extreme example.

What I’m reading

When I went to Spain last year for the Panoplia I gave a talk on making a living as a historical martial artist. The core approach I take is to “let them help” rather than “make them pay” (where “them” are the students). I got that idea from Amanda Palmer’s famous TED talk. Because of the core usefulness of the idea, I bought her book The Art of Asking. It’s odd. On the one hand, there’s some really interesting stuff in there about how she learned to ask for help. On the other hand, she comes across as self-absorbed, entitled, and frankly, exploitative. I almost wish I hadn’t read it. My reading may be coloured by the awful news about her ex-husband Neil Gaiman, who by his own admission got into a bath with his kid’s nanny (about 40 years younger than him) on her first day on the job. I mean, yuck. Listening to the Tortoise Media podcast series where they expose the various shenanigans Gaiman got up to, it seems that in at least a couple of cases Palmer delivered the young woman up to her husband. She certainly doesn’t come across well.

I think the podcast makes far too much of the “is it technically criminal sexual assault” and not enough of the “whether it’s a crime or not, what the actual?” But it’s harrowing to listen to, so listener beware.

I don’t mean to ruin your enjoyment of Gaiman’s many excellent works. But have a listen to the Tortoise Media podcast, or at least scan the shownotes, before you buy another one of his books. I’m not qualified to say whether he’s a criminal or not. But there is no way in hell I’d let my daughters anywhere near him.

In happier news, Gilgamesh, the second instalment of Emily H. Wilson’s epic (see what I did there) Sumerian Trilogy, is really good. I’m not as blown away as I was by the first one, mostly because my two favourite characters (Nishubar and Marduk) get a lot less to do, but it’s a weird and wonderful re-thinking of the whole Sumerian Annunaki thing. I’ll definitely be pre-ordering the third instalment.

cheers,

Guy