The lesson from practice today focused on plate 11 from Capoferro, which demonstrates several different methods for attacking underneath an opponent’s sword with a passing step. The plate gives examples for when the opponent attempts to gain your blade on the inside line, has already gained your blade in either line, or you have gained [...]
This is a lesson that I did with Dori at practice yesterday. My goal for this lesson was a little different then what I usually do. The idea was that during the lesson we might start with a base action, and then once that was working, I would either counter the action, or give a [...]
In yesterday’s lesson, my goal was to cover as many of the variations of the actions described in plate 7 of Capoferro as I could. We took some video of the lesson so that we could post it and show our interpretations of this material and talk a little bit about how we understand the [...]
Last week I posted a lesson where we worked through plates 7 and 9 of Capoferro. Since I had my camera with me I thought it might fun to see if I could get some of the actions on film. These are two of the actions described in Plate 7. In the first action, Dori [...]
Cappoferro says some pretty confusing things about feints in his manual. At the beginning of the manual he talks about how you shouldn’t use them very much, but by the time you get to the plates, it’s clear that feints are a fundamental part of the system. So what’s the deal with that? Is he [...]
Capoferro talks a fair amount about different guards in his manual, but uses the term in a couple of different ways. He refers to the four basic guards, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, and defines them as being a certain orientation of the hilt and sword. Earlier though he says that 1st and 2nd aren’t [...]
