Hi,

Parry like it’s 1482!

You probably recall I’ve got a new book out, the companion volume to the Vadi facsimile. And I mentioned that my daughter created sketches of all the images in the treatise, to get around pesky Italian copyright contrarianism. The excellent Katie Mackenzie took one of those sketches, coloured it in, and created awesome t-shirts from the results. I have one ordered already, and you can get your own by clicking on the link below:

Lunge like it’s 1787!

Moving ahead a few centuries, we have a smallsword live online mechanics seminar coming up (in case you missed the launch email last week). It’s 90 minutes of fencing goodness, with a Q and A at the end. I’ve allowed 30 minutes for the Q and A, but I’ll keep answering your questions until either my voice gives out or the internet breaks. Or you run out of questions.

Foundations of Smallsword Webinar

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.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!).

To make the workshop accessible across multiple time zones, it will be taught twice: • Saturday July 4th, 7pm UK time • Saturday July 11th, 8am UK time

Register once and attend either session or both. All registered participants will receive recordings of both classes.

The Sword Guy Returns!

We have re-started The Sword Guy podcast, and are coming hot out of the gates with Episode 218: Physics, Rainbows and 3D Printing, with Dr Stephan Eickelmann

Dr Stephan Eickelmann is the founder, president and head instructor of Schildwache Potsdam and a key organiser behind events such as Swords of the Renaissance (where you'll find Guy every year) and the International Torneo di Spada League. Alongside Stephan’s work in historical martial arts, he is a physicist with a PhD in experimental soft matter and interface physics, and a university researcher and teacher.

Stefan discovered historical martial arts during his PhD, and was drawn to its flat hierarchies, research driven mindset and emphasis on shared inquiry. His approach to teaching focuses on enabling independent thinking rather than transmitting authority. He is also involved in equipment design, open source safety development and building inclusive, responsibility driven club and event cultures.

We chat about how historical fencing is where teaching, making, research, safety and community all come together.

Our conversation also touches on the challenges of balancing traditional martial arts practices with modern safety and inclusivity. We discuss the impact of how small gestures, like painting nails and club t-shirts, create a more relaxed and inclusive environment in class.

Next Steps for The Sword Guy

The show has now been running for five years. While I’ve been off work I have given a lot of thought to the show. I love doing it, but it is proving very expensive to run. By far the biggest single cost is the transcriptions (over $100 per episode! Because they have to be edited by hand, or you get a very confused mish-mash of AI slop, because the bots can’t handle medieval German, or anything else worth knowing), so for the current episode we’re experimenting with just doing extended shownotes. Take a look at swordschool.com/podcast and let me know what you think!

If there are folk out there relying on the transcriptions, then let me know…I’ve also been thinking about adding video to the podcast. Now, I listen to podcasts all the time, and never ever watch them. But it seems that most successful shows are including more or less edited and polished video. What do you think? It’s a significant amount of work to produce, and not all of my guests will want to be videoed, but it may help us reach people who need the visuals.

It also occurred to me that we have an archive of over 200 episode transcriptions, adding up to about 2.4 million words. This is an incredibly rich resource of insights, information, and opinions on everything from running a club to fencing in tournaments to historical research to archaeology to teaching HMA to neurodiversity to psychology to mounted combat, and on and on. But at the moment all this amazing stuff (because let’s face it: I have the best guests) is buried in a mountain of audio and transcriptions. So, I am planning on curating the key sections from the most qualified guests on specific topics, editing it together, and publishing those as (probably) ebook/pdfs, and compiling several issues into actual books. Something like (just to take one topic example, and a very incomplete list of guests):

Insights from The Sword Guy: Issue 1: Mounted Combat, with Jason Kingsley, Jen Landels, Callum Forbes, Sarah Hay, Jack Gassmann, and Dr. Tobias Capwell.

The key point is I am by no means an expert in mounted combat, but all those guests are, and this way you can learn a ton about a specific topic without having to dig through 200 episodes to find what you want.

Of course every guest will get the chance to opt out of being included (because I didn’t explicitly get their permission for this use of their episode beforehand).

I might also create an index of all the episodes, by topic. So you look up “chivalry”, and it will tell you which episodes to listen to.

What do you think?

yours,

Guy
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