From Reading to Doing: Learning how to fence from old books

These are notes from a class that I taught a few years ago on how to go about reading source material and translating it to practical knowledge. Learning how to fence from a book is difficult. The class was meant to give an overview of the process of reconstructing a fencing system from a historical text.

The process is divided into four parts: learning the techniques, understanding theory, training the system, and refining your interpretations.

Learning the Techniques

• Read the entire book, several times.
• Develop a working interpretation of the mechanical details from the book
  • You may need to import knowledge from other books or disciplines
  • You won’t get it perfect. You can iterate on it as you understand the material better
  • Fencing masters then disagreed then just as much as they do now. It’s more important to understand the problem that each was trying to solve and how their solutions address it then it is to try to figure out who was right or wrong.
• The basic movements serve as building blocks for putting together actions, but they are rarely spelled out in a text so they may need to be reverse-engineered.
• When reading a plate, it’s just as important to look at the actions of the fencer who was hit, as it is to look at the actions of the fencer who “won.”

Example from Capoferro’s plate 7:

“As the explanation of the following illustration, you (D) gain the blade of your opponent (C) to the inside. He performs a cavazione to attack you with a thrust to the chest, and you strike him with a thrust to the left eye, either with no step or with an accrescimento (as shown). A prudent opponent would act as follows. He would feint the cavazione while keeping his body somewhat back. When you come forward for your attack, he would perform an outside parry (with the false or true edge), and give you a mandritto to your face or an imbrocatta to the chest. He would then recover in a low quarta.” (Trans, Tom Leoni)

Here are some of the techniques from this plate:

• Engaging on the inside (fourth)
• Engaging on the inside and attacking with a glide (implied)
• From your opponent’s engagement, attack with a disengagement to the outside
• Against an attack to the outside, parry to the outside with the true edge and riposte with a thrust
• Against an attack to the outside, parry to the outside with the false edge and riposte with a cut
• Against an attack to the outside, counterattack with a thrust (with and without a lunge)

Understanding the theory

• The plates are often demonstrations of a piece of theory or tactic. We need to build a picture of how the actions all work together and the kinds of decisions that we need to be able to make while fencing.
• We can build tables describing how techniques are used and what options are available in a given situation. Here’s a table showing the parries that Capoferro describes in his text:

• We can also start to think about the decisions the fencers are making in each plate. Here’s the logic that fencer D is working from:

• And here’s the strategy that the clever fencer is working from:

Training the System

• In training, we want to be able to work on techniques and concepts in isolation first and then gradually decrease the restrictions until our training resembles our fencing.
• Different types of drills can accomplish different things. More cooperative drills can help with developing technical precision, while more antognistic drills can help develop timing, distance, and speed.
• Start simple and gradually introduce choices into the drills. To start with, a choice should be between two, pre-planned actions. Eventually, it can be a choice between many action, both planned and unplanned.
• Introduce movement and multiple hits.

Refining your Interpretations

• Talk to other people who’ve done similar work
• Read the book again, as you get more experience, you’ll see new things
• No historical (or modern) manual describes the entirety of fencing. Read other books that offer additional information and different perspectives.

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