For those of you playing along at home, below are the questions developed while doing the reading. Some of them have simple answers found in one sentence, some have answers spread across many chapters. Why does he divide the sword into four parts? What are the traits of a counter-guard? At what measure is a […]
Archive for the ‘Italian Rapier’ Category
Minimalist Italian Rapier Experiment – Study Questions Leave a comment
Minimalist Italian Experiment – intro 7 comments
Dante’s devised this scheme to re-focus the local Italianate fencers on the fundamentals of theory and form instead of plate replication. The textbook for the experiment would be Leoni’s Fabris, which we all have access to. The available guards were limited to extended quarta for single sword, and a withdrawn terza for dagger. Reading: Chapter […]
Some Basic Italian Drills 7 comments
For the last several months, Ruairc and myself have been meeting on Tuesday evenings to work through a series of fencing drills that focus on the basics of Italian fencing. We’ve made quite a bit of progress as a result, and our Tuesday evening drilling time has helped us both with figuring out how to […]
Convergent Evolution in Fencing Styles 4 comments
Convergent evolution: n, the appearance of apparently similar structures in organisms of different lines of descent. Essentially reaching the same solution derived from two different starting points. The advantages created by flight lead bats, birds, and butterflies to create wings.Visually the wings appear similar: large, thin shapes to help the creature fly, but structurally they […]
Fabris, Plate 25 4 comments
First of (hopefully) a series, to revenge myself ironically on Letia’s ill-conceived term “plateify”. (Don’t ask.) I’ll be taking a plate each week or so and drilling it, then presenting my findings here. In this episode, I attempt to ameliorate my abysmal oblique footwork. Fabris seems fairly consistent in advocating an offline step to the […]
Fabris: Sword and dagger, the Wedge of Doom 2 comments
During the winter, spring, and early summer Letia and I were focused on learning about fighting with the sword alone. Since the end of Pennsic we have begun to focus more on the combination of sword and dagger. According to Fabris everything that he taught with regards to the sword alone is still valid. Tempo […]
Fabris: Finding the Sword Part 1 Leave a comment
When thinking about a fight there are three major concepts to consider. Am I in measure? Have I found their sword? Is my opponent taking a tempo? These concepts of measure, line, and tempo are all related and one cannot be examined without the others playing some role. However, for the time being Letia and […]
Fabris 12/1/11 27 comments
11/28/11 Neither Letia nor I had fought for a while so our warmups ran a bit longer than usual, until it started raining to be precise. At that point we went inside and began to look at Wounds 1 and 2 from Fabris’ first book. Each wound has a picture showing the end result and […]
Fabris 11/16/11 Leave a comment
Much like last week we fought warm up passes, fought some Fabris passes and then drilled. The drills were very similar to last week although we experimented some. We found that the attack where you drop the tip worked well enough coming in at roughly the center of mass because voiding requires a fairly […]
Fabris 11/9/11 Leave a comment
Warm ups consisted of me (Tassin) and Letia fighting a number of passes with sword and dagger in our normal SCA style of fighting. This continued until we were both warmed up. Drills: Today’s drills focused on finding the blade and attacking. First drill, finding the blade: Agente and patiente start out of measure. The […]