I disagree about Sainct Didier, but I'm curious why you say that his terms have an Italian influence. I might be wrong, but I'm thinking of renvers, maindroit and estoc as imports from Italian. I realize that this is disputable. They could also result from similar derivations in both languages. At ...
Interesting. So it seems that the French might not have had a robust national tradition during the Renaissance the same way that the Germans, Italians, and Spaniards did. As far as the English go, it seems like they did have a true national tradition (at least George Silver strongly insists on it),...
Hm. That's interesting. So it sounds like you could treat Thibault's sword as either a skinny sidesword or a short rapier. So I guess it could work either way. Well for me it's squarely rapier, in the sense that it's a style that develops in opposition to older methods. But yeah, I guess it could w...
Particularly, I'm interested in learning whether Thibault's manual is considered to be a Side Sword manual or a Rapier manual. It's hard to tell. Surprisingly it depends on your definition of rapier :) Thibault pictures weapons that are pretty thin, but also relatively short. Ground to navel is the...
in some cases I think it may even be a teaser to get the noble reader to hire the author and see what else he knows. One particularly glaring teaser is the plate about rapier vs. polearm at the end of Fabris's book... Unarmed vs. dagger is the most thoroughly covered mismatch, I think, probably bec...
If I recall correctly, and I could be mistaken as I'm going entirely from my exhausted memory here, but I do believe there were court documents that recorded the accounts of the duel. One thing I do remember is that the accused man was made to stand in a pit, not unlike those in the aforementioned ...
Such absurdities were not strictly limited to marital spats either, there is one Mediæval account of a man who, having been accused of murder, was ordered by the courts to face his accuser in a duel. The accuser was the dog of the murdered man! I have to ask on this one... who won? The dog :) The s...
2. The idea that a sword must have a long, slender blade and complex hilt to be used effectively in a single sword style isn't in line with historical evidence. The Messer and Dussack were incredibly popular weapons in Germanic and Northern/Central Europe for centuries and were rarely taught with t...
Based on the illustrations, my conclusion is that Di Grassi and Sainct-Didier intended their manuals primarily for the sidesword, but mixed in arming swords to show that their fencing style was flexible enough to be effective with other similar weapons. Well, for Di Grassi, Stacy has explained what...
For me Di Grassi and Sainct-Didier are both unambiguously sidesword (i.e. long blade complex hilt). The illustrations cannot be entirely trusted, especially those of the English edition of Di Grassi. In the Italian, the blades are long and the index is wrapped around the quillon, a form of grip that...
You can foyne and thrust with any length sword you please, and any blade width for that matter as long as you are strong enough to control the point. A simple cross may endanger your hand more than a compound hilt, as Vincent states, but the physics of foyning remain sound whether you're using a No...
I'd certainly agree that there are more similarities than differences. I think presenting these ideas as a one-dimensional succession is a mistake; most "rapier" treatises can apply to sideswords or equivalent forms of their days. The variety of blades is staggering and does not just boil ...
