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.
Swordschool turns 24!
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Hi! Time flies... Swordschool turned 24 years old yesterday! March 17th 2001 saw the very first class I taught as a full-time professional instructor, at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. Not the whole Olympic Stadium. A small room somewhere inside it. I was expecting about 6 to 12 people, and something over 70 showed up. Some of them are still training now. I don’t have a photo of that very day, but digging around through the archives I found some golden oldies. Here’s what a rapier class looked like in (I think) 2002:
And the photoshoot for The Swordsman’s Companion in 2003 was very serious.
And lots of hard work.
And nobody fooled around because it was serious hard work.
The School depended so entirely on the goodwill and trust of those early adopters, who had no good reason to believe I knew what I was doing, but turned up to class anyway. So to celebrate Swordschool turning 24, you can use the code SWORDSCHOOL24 at checkout to get 24% off all digital products (not printed books, t-shirts etc, sorry. They cost too much to produce!). You can find courses at courses.swordschool.com, and books, audiobooks, and print-at-home pdfs of my card game Audatia at swordschool.shop Just use the code at checkout to get the discount. The code expires on March 31st. Thanks for coming along on the Swordschool ride, whenever it was you started! 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.
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...
BOOKS PODCAST COURSES COMMUNITY BLOG Hi! I’ve been in a bit of a zine-making frenzy this week. It started innocently enough. I’ve been updating the Swordschool Wiki, and we’ve now reached a major milestone: every one of Fiore’s 70+ dagger plays now has its own page, with the image from the Getty manuscript, my translation, and my interpretation on video. You can explore the whole lot here, along with a goodly chunk of the longsword plays, and all of the abrazare. Fiore on the Wiki Working...