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Featuring period drawings and prints of swordplay, this book examines and compares three Elizabethan fencing manuals written in English before 1600: Giacomo Di Grassi’s His True Arte of Defense (1594), Vincentio Saviolo’s His Practice in Two Bookes (1595), and George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence and Bref Instructions upon My Paradoxes of Defence (1599). More than a technical manual on swordplay, this book explores the influence of a new form of violence introduced into Elizabethan culture by the invention of the rapier. The authors examine the rapier’s influence on the various social classes, the clash between the traditional English fencing masters and those embracing the new style, the growing concern with unregulated dueling, and the frequent references to rapier play in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As producer Joseph Papp notes in his foreword, this is a book that "makes a difference in performance."
This book is designed to educate the reader about the evolution and development of arms, armor, and personal combat for the stage. It is the perfect guide for locating books, articles, and videos for those involved in the historical reenactment of duels and battles. It simultaneously offers historical context and points the reader toward useful and easily obtainable resources to inform their fights, costumes, and stage weaponry. This resource text is a must have for fight directors, teachers of stage combat, historical re-enactors, costumers, and weapons makers. The body of the work is divided up into five chapters and a series of appendices containing a compendium of useful information for fight directors and weapons makers. Chapter one surveys the evolution and development of arms, armor, and personal combat. Chapters two, three, and four consist of annotations of books, articles, and videos respectively. Chapter five offers concluding remarks on the project.
“Guy has the rare talent of making this material accessible” -Neal Stephenson (from his Foreword to Swordfighting) “Guy Windsor's greatest gift to WMA/HEMA is his marvellous ability to translate period language into a meaningful experience for modern WMA/HEMA practitioners and he has once more shown his ability to do exactly that.” - Adam (review of Veni Vadi Vici) NOTE: THIS EDITION DOES NOT INCLUDE A FACSIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT From the late fifteenth century comes a detailed manuscript on knightly combat, written by Philippo Vadi. Dedicated to one of the most famous Italian condottiere of the age, Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, this book covers the theory of combat with the longsword, as well as dozens of techniques of the sword, the spear, the pollax, and the dagger. The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest includes a detailed introduction, setting Vadi and his combat style in their historical context, a complete translation of the manuscript, and a detailed commentary from the perspective of the practising martial artist. Please note it does not include a facsimile of the manuscript, but that may be downloaded from a link provided in the text. This volume is the second edition of Dr. Windsor’s earlier work, Veni Vadi Vici, updating the translation and the introduction. This is essential reading for any practitioner of knightly combat, academic historian, or enthusiast for the quattrocento period of Italian history.
This work, the first of a two-volume set, brings together essays of European and American scholars on the wider regional and topical aspects of the Hundred Years War as well as articles that revisit questions posed and supposedly "solved" by traditional Hundred Years War scholarship.
Many books have discussed boxing in the ancient world, but this is the first to describe how boxing was reborn in the modern world. Modern boxing began in the Middle Ages in England as a criminal activity. It then became a sport supported by the kings and aristocracy. Later it was again outlawed and only in the 20th century has it become a sport popular around the world. This book describes how modern boxing began in England as an outgrowth of the native English sense of fair play. It demonstrates that boxing was the common man's alternative to the sword duel of honor, and argues that boxing and fair play helped Englishmen avoid the revolutions common to France, Italy and Germany during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. English enthusiasm for boxing largely drove out the pistol and sword duels from English society. And although boxing remains a brutal sport, it has made England one of the safest countries in the world. It also examines how the rituals of boxing developed: the meaning of the parade to the ring; the meaning of the ring itself; why only two men fight at one time; why the fighters shake hands before each fight; why a boxing match is called a prizefight; and why a knock-down does not end the bout. Its sources include material from medieval manuscripts, and its notes and bibliography are extensive.
"Benefit from the experience of one of the most accomplished experts in the field. A must-read for beginners and advanced practitioners alike." - Roland Warzecha, DIMICATOR The warriors, knights and duellists of old depended on their skill at arms for their lives. You can learn their techniques and tactics too. From renowned swordsman and teacher Guy Windsor comes an indispensable resource for anyone interested in martial arts, swordsmanship, and history. Through this book Guy will teach you how to train your mind and body to become an expert in historical martial arts. It includes the seven principles of mastery, considers the ethics of martial arts, and goes into detail about the process of recreating historical martial arts from written sources. On the practical side, Guy explains how to develop your skills, and lays out the path for students to become teachers, covering the basics of safe training, looking after your body, and even starting your own training group and teaching basic classes. An accessible, motivating read that includes many suggestions for further study, including courses, books and other resources, this book sets out to answer every question about historical martial arts you may have. Note that this is not a training manual for a specific style: it provides the foundations for every style. Your journey starts here. You decide where it ends.
Featuring period drawings and prints of swordplay, this book examines and compares the only three existing Elizabethan fencing manuals written in English before 1600. In addition, it explores the influence of a new form of violence introduced into Elizabethan culture by the invention of the rapier.
This book offers an analysis of Jacobean duelling and gentry honour culture through the close examination and contextualisation of the most fully documented duel of the early modern era. This was the fatal encounter between a Flintshire gentleman, Edward Morgan, and his Cheshire antagonist, John Egerton, which took place at Highgate on 21 April 1610. John Egerton was killed, but controversy quickly erupted over whether he had died in a fair fight of honour or had been murdered in a shameful conspiracy. The legal investigation into the killing produced a rich body of evidence which reveals in unparalleled detail not only the dynamics of the fight itself, but also the inner workings of a seventeenth-century metropolitan manhunt, the Middlesex coroner's court, a murder trial at King's Bench, and also the murky webs of aristocratic patronage at the Jacobean Court which ultimately allowed Morgan to secure a pardon. Uniquely, a series of dramatic Star Chamber suits have survived that also allow us to investigate the duel's origins. Their close examination, as Lloyd Bowen shows, calls into question the historiographical paradigm which sees early modern duels as matters of the moment and distinct from, as opposed to connected to, the gentry feud. The book throws much new light on questions of gentry honour, the nature and prevalence of early modern elite violence, and the process of judicial investigation in Shakespeare's England.
Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.
This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.