The Best Sword Show: See you March 16 in Timonium, MD!

Same time, same place. Every year in mid-March, the Maryland Arms & Armor Collectors Association puts on a monumental sales show.

Hope I’ll see you there on Saturday!

Big Bang Theory, 1566: The Nerd with the Golden Nose

Maybe Cousin Manderup was “in his spot”. Maybe it was Fermat’s Next-to-Last Theorem proving that 2 + 2 = 5 ? Fact is that a squabble among freshman nerds at the theology professor’s house ended in an ugly injury that made one of the geeks almost as famous for his rhinoplasty as for his scientific discoveries…

Battle Royal: The Last Stand of Richard III Plantagenet

He lost his horse, his Kindom, and his life, although not necessarily in that order. Richard III’s bones have now been recovered from underneath a parking lot in Leicestershire, England—and identified as belonging to The Bard’s titular protagonist. Even better for scholars of shiny sharp things, the evidence shows that the king, indeed, met an untimely death by his head’s contact with various heavy bladed weapons—just as a Renaissance Burgundian scribe has claimed.

Silence of the Sticks: Why wooden weapons fell out of favor in 19th-century Germany

The Irish beat each other with shilelaghs, the English drew blood with singlesticks and quarterstaves, the French wielded canne and baton. The Portuguese still play at jogo de pao and the Italians had the bastone. The Germans, however, showed no interest in wooden weapons, at least after the Fechtschul traditions of dussack and assorted staff weapons (most of which with a blade of one kind or another) had disappeared. How come?

Gratuitous Violence: The Tough Guy’s Guide to getting things DONE!

World War II put a temporary dent into the popularity of Asian martial arts in America that “jiu jitsu” had briefly enjoyed in the 1920′s and 1930′s. It wasn’t until the aptly titled “chop sockey” movies out of Hong Kong that Western audiences reconnected with the highly stylized if not artistically choreographed exotics. Until then, the shortest way from Point A to Point B was a straight right to the chops…

Come and get them.

 

Preview: The Codex Amberger and its predecessors

After many a year of absolutely nothing, the dining room table is now bending with old and new books, reams of print-outs, photographs, articles, bibliographies: We’ve finally started to work on the definitive monograph to the modest 15-page anonymous manuscript fragment we acquired back in 2005.

To sucker as many experts as we can into doing our work for us, we’ll be presenting some of the preliminary work here on FencingClassics… to elicit qualified response and criticism and, yes, lavish praise.

Let’s kick off the process by presenting Sheet 8r, which may prove to be a key element in properly placing the fragment in its proper lineage…

Legends of the Sword: Satan fights a Mensur

The German novelist and poet Wilhelm Hauff (1802—1827) is more famous for his fairy tales than for his novels. Unreasonably so, because his Memoiren des Satan alone are better written and more enjoyable than all the semi-competent writage they throw at German literature students in college these days.

Hauff studied philosophy and theology at Tübingen. In 1826, he wrote Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Satan (Memoirs of Beelzebub), in which he works in some of the fencing activities of his brother, a member of the Tübinger Burschenschaft.

For the connoisseur of Gedecktes Hiebfechten, this is a rare monument of armament and strategy of the early Mensur…

Free Resources: The Wrestling Arts of Medieval Germany

We spare no cost to proselytize the combative arts of Europe to the larger web community.

But we’re also not above letting other people foot the bill. Like those 1%ers at Google, who’ve been scanning in old books like there’s no tomorrow. Today, we bring to you a title we’d have given our eye teeth for, had it been available as an antiquarian book just five years ago:

Dr. Karl Wassmannsdorff’s Die Ringkunst des deutschen Mittelalters…

Hooked on Phonics: Dr. “Fartin’” Luther and the Gun Wad Bible

This one has absolutely nothing to do with fencing and swords.

It only goes to show what can happen to a historical text if insufficient diligence is applied reading and transcribing it.

As in the following example from a spiffy catalog, sent to me by a reputable seller of expensive-as-sin antiquarian books…