Two-Hand Swords: Highly Specialized or Just Big Longswords?

[Tim Rivera]

Wow, a dozen manuals is quite a bit!

That's just those three. There are a lot of verdadera destreza manuals, and they tend to be quite verbose.

So with those four you gave links to (and Puck and Mary's book), an English reader should be able to practice la Verdadera Destreza? That's good to know.

A form of it. There a a variety of styles.

OK, so Godinho sounds like the go-to master for earlier Spanish fencing.

Unless you count Monte.

[James Brazas]

It sounds like there's a tremendous amount of material in la Verdadera Destreza tradition. I'm looking forward to delving more into it.

I imagine much of their verbosity comes from talking at length about fencing theory and philosophy. Am I right? I know many of the later Bolognese masters do that. The earlier masters in the Bolognese tradition (and all the German masters) focus much more closely on the actual techniques and tactics of fencing.

Is Monte translated into English?

I'm fairly fluent in modern Castilian Spanish, though I imagine with all the jargon, the technical terms, and the fact that the Spanish here is 500 years older than what I speak, I probably wouldn't be able to read it well enough to go through the un-translated versions.

[Tim Rivera]

I imagine much of their verbosity comes from talking at length about fencing theory and philosophy. Am I right? I know many of the later Bolognese masters do that. The earlier masters in the Bolognese tradition (and all the German masters) focus much more closely on the actual techniques and tactics of fencing.

Is Monte translated into English?

Any English translation of Monte has not yet been published.

Destreza texts tend to be verbose for a variety of reasons, and talking about theory and philosophy is one of them. The style itself was created in a way so as to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, so it's nearly impossible to do succinctly. They put a burden of proof on themselves, which again doesn't lend well to being terse. As such, they tend to reference a lot of non-fencing texts and ideas in order to be more scholarly about it, which makes it worse. On top of all that, as you probably know, the Spanish writing style tends to be lengthy. All of that adds up to a monstrous amount of written material.

[James Brazas]

That makes a lot of sense. They may be verbose, but after reading them I would at least have a very good idea of why they do what they do. So that'll make interpreting it much easier once I understand it.

Thank you very much!

[steve hick]

I imagine much of their verbosity comes from talking at length about fencing theory and philosophy. Am I right? I know many of the later Bolognese masters do that. The earlier masters in the Bolognese tradition (and all the German masters) focus much more closely on the actual techniques and tactics of fencing.

Is Monte translated into English?

Any English translation of Monte has not yet been published.

Destreza texts tend to be verbose for a variety of reasons, and talking about theory and philosophy is one of them. The style itself was created in a way so as to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, so it's nearly impossible to do succinctly. They put a burden of proof on themselves, which again doesn't lend well to being terse. As such, they tend to reference a lot of non-fencing texts and ideas in order to be more scholarly about it, which makes it worse. On top of all that, as you probably know, the Spanish writing style tends to be lengthy. All of that adds up to a monstrous amount of written material.

In addition since they have a pretty precise nomenclature describing where and when you are and then what you and your sword does takes a paragraph - each. There are significant practical sections here and there, it is just you have to wade.

[steve hick]

Are any of those three manuals in English yet?

Between those three authors, there are about a dozen manuals (I think eight for Pacheco, two for Ettenhard, and two for Rada). To the best of my knowledge, the only verdadera destreza manuals (mostly just partly rather than all) that have been translated to English are:

Part of Carranza's first dialog (1582) - an uninformed translation, probably not very helpful
The third part of Grandezas de la Espada (1600) Pacheco's first book
Metodo de Enseñanza (1639) - Diaz de Viedma
Nearly the first two treatises of Compendio de los Fundamentos (1675) - Ettenhard

All together, not much compared to what exists, but you can probably make sense of it given Puck and Mary's primer. Only Ettenhard's book really covers the basics, but that's not complete.

May I ask what masters you would recommend for earlier (pre-Verdadera Destreza) Spanish fencing? You've mentioned Godinho. Are there others or is he the only major surviving author for the older styles?

Godinho is the only author whose work we've found so far. It's from 1599, so post-Carranza, pre-Pacheco, but in line with what we know of the older stuff.

Tim

Actually just one of Rada's is three books and perhaps more than 1000 pages. Pacheco altogether may have written twice that, or more.

Steve