Hi,

I’m off to Germany this weekend to teach at Swords of the Renaissance. If you’ll be there, come say hello!

I’ll be teaching three classes: one on Vadi’s mechanics, one on Capoferro’s mechanics, and one on Angelo’s salute. In a break from my usual lackadaisical approach to class notes, each class has its own little zine. You can find them all at guywindsor.net/zines.​

For some reason the Capoferro zine was a monster to format. These are just the rejects!

If you can’t make the Capoferro class at Swords of the Renaissance, then the next best thing is to come to the webinar, where we’ll cover pretty much everything you can learn about Capoferro’s mechanics without a partner. I’m really looking forward to it. If you want to understand Capoferro’s mechanics, or see how we apply the principles of body mechanics to interpreting a specific historical source, this webinar is for you…

A Care Package for Sword People

I’ve also completely overhauled my Sword Person’s Care Package.

As you probably know, because you probably have it, it’s a free collection of useful things for sword people. I’ve rewritten and reorganised it so it’s a much better introduction to what I do and, more importantly, a more useful thing in its own right.

It's what's known as a "reader magnet", so basically an incentive to sign up to the mailing list. You're already on the list, so you’re very welcome to grab the new one here.

A chunk of the new material is a guided tour through my various stuff, from the Wiki to the podcast, and from my courses to my books, to help people find the things that are most useful to them. I’ve reformatted that chunk into a new Start Here page.

It begins with a simple question:

What are your sword goals?

From there, it points you towards the bits of my work that are most likely to be useful, whether you want to learn a particular weapon, get better at training, study historical sources, or just generally become better at sword stuff. It prioritises my free content, like the Wiki and the podcast.

The Duel of the Hat

Remember the book I’m supposed to be writing, How to Win Sword Fights? One of the sidebars got completely out of hand. It started with me digging up the story of the Duel of the Hat, from Alfred Hutton, as an example of how savage sword fighting can be. Then I wondered what he was basing it on (he’s not famous for being a meticulous historian). So I went digging… and digging… and it’s already a book-sized bit of in-depth research.

Top tip: Hutton gets the basic story right. Every later account I’ve found in English (e.g. Baldick (1965) and Holland (2004)) gets the story horribly wrong, thanks to a French history of duelling published in 1861…

There’s a hat, obviously. Feathers. Sword thrusts specifically dedicated to different components of the offending hat. Daggers. Biting. A priest dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. And an absolutely extraordinary amount of information lurking in obscure nineteenth-century French publications.

I’m not sure where this fits into the publication schedule, but I imagine it’ll be out before How to Win Sword Fights, not least because I’m down the rabbit hole and still digging for Australia.

Back to Capoferro

I’ve also been looking into Capoferro himself. We know surprisingly little about the man beyond what appears in his book, but I’ve been following some threads around his family, his time in Siena, and the people involved in producing the book and its engravings. Some of those threads are going nowhere. Others are getting interesting. I’ll tell you more when I know which is which. The Capoferro mechanics webinar ends with a Q&A, as usual, so you can always ask me what I’ve dug up and I’m honour-bound to answer…

Cheers,

Guy