| It's only a flesh wound |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|06:19 pm] |
AEMMA had its annual longsword tournament yesterday. Good times.
I spent the entire two weeks beforehand battling the Zombie Flu That Will Not Die, and not doing any sparring, so I was happy just to be able to come out and hold my own. Hopefully some video of the event will show up on the internet shortly.
We had thirteen fighters representing Toronto, Guelph and Ottawa, as well as Dale Gienow from Muskoka. The tournament was round-robin style, with bouts going to five palpable hits. (We started by playing to three hits, but switched to five to prolong the entertainment.) The only other significant rule was that hand hits weren't counted. This limited the number of bruises and smashed fingers.
Unfortunately, in my ninth match I managed to mess up my thumb anyway. ( Read more... )
All this reminds me of an illustration I ran across once. This is a fifteenth-century Wound Man from Wellcome Library MS 290. The wound man usually shows up as the last picture in late medieval anatomy books. He illustrates all the different kinds of injuries that a medieval surgeon might encounter.
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| On Gambesons |
[Aug. 23rd, 2009|07:33 pm] |
I attempted to wash my sparring gambeson last night and made a little discovery about military history.
My gambeson is a Matuls aketon, made similarly to fourteenth-century ones out of many layers of raw linen quilted together. It looks a lot like this image (only grimier). I put it in the washing machine with a couple of towels to keep the load from unbalancing. When I pulled it out, it weighed--I'm not exaggerating--forty pounds. The spin cycle on the machine did nothing to get the water out.
I took it to the sink at the laundromat and squeezed about two liters of water out of it. Then I lugged it home, put it in the bathtub and trod on it for awhile. After that I hung it over the rail of my balcony and I've been squeezing a cup or two of water out of it every few hours all day. Matt2 says that when he washed his kit, it took a week to dry.
I can't imagine fighting in that thing in a downpour. It would eventually weigh more than steel armour. The battle of Agincourt must have sucked. |
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| When snails attack |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval has a good post this week about the motif of a knight fighting a snail in the marginal illustrations of manuscripts. He shared this image from the Macclesfield Psalter.
I see two things in that picture.
1. The knight is drawing his sword with his left hand. There aren't many illustrations of left-handed swordsmen in medieval art. The only other one I can think of is from 1497 and shows up in the statutes of the Collegium Sapientiae in Freiburg. You can see it on the cover of Ruth Mazo Karras' From Boys to Men.
2. The left-handedness may be part of the joke. It looks to me like we're supposed to understand that the knight was out for a stroll, carrying his sheathed sword wrapped up in his sword belt, like the statues on Naumburg cathedral. Suddenly, he was ambushed by a snail! It all happened so fast that he didn't have time to transfer his scabbard to his left hand. (It was a racing snail, ok?) So now he has to use a variation of the quick-draw technique from the last play of the sword vs. dagger section in Fiore dei Liberi's Flos Duellatorum. He's about to poke the snail in the eye with his scabbard chape in order to buy a moment to sort himself out.
It's a joke about speed, but it's also an arming sword play, complete with encoded information about weight transfer and footwork. That's the cool thing about medieval fighting illustrations: they're more like little video clips than single stop-motion photographs. If you study enough fechtbucher, you start to recognize the motion compressed into them. You see how the knight has taken his right foot off the line of attack? You can tell because the background gives you some perspective and because his weight is on his left. After he hits the snail in the eye, he clears his sword, pivots around his right foot and strikes the beast from its now-blind side. It's all one tempo; Fiore would love it. |
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| Blonde privilege |
[May. 14th, 2009|07:39 pm] |
When you're white and you're female, you can carry a longsword down Bay Street, a few blocks from the nation's financial district, and the only person whose eyes focus on it will be the woman panhandling in front of the coffee shop. It's like magic. |
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| Kel's First Rule Illustrated |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval posted a great image this week. It's a marginal illustration from Pierpont Morgan G24, a Flemish copy of The Vows of the Peacock from circa 1350.
Does this picture look sort of familiar to anyone else? The nifty thing is that it predates Fiore by a good fifty years and Talhoffer by more than a century.
Ever had one of those moments when you were so intent on getting the fancy footwork right that you forgot the not-getting-hit part? That's me on the left. |
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| Want to hold a real medieval sword? |
[Oct. 28th, 2008|05:10 pm] |
It occurs to me only now that a lot of you will be interested in this event. Kel will be there talking about armour and Adam will be letting people hold his XIIIa. Scoot down to Hart House if you can. It starts at 7:00. |
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| Medieval history/HEMA news flash!!! |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|04:49 pm] |
There are now officially four extant manuscripts of Fiore dei Liberi's Flower of Battle. Fabrice Cognot, a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, announced this morning that he'd found images from #4 hiding in plain sight on an online database belonging to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. For the medieval martial arts community, this is like finding another Beowulf manuscript.
You can see the new "De Arte Luctandi" by going here and typing 11269 into the search field.
ETA: I should also credit Ken Mondschein, who apparently got the BN to scan the manuscript. |
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| Men are from Mars, Women are from Ethiopia |
[Sep. 17th, 2008|02:09 pm] |
I don't usually spend much of my time thinking about gender issues, except in the context of medieval history. I like living as though all the great battles for women's rights have already been won, although I know intellectually that it is not so. And then once in awhile, something reminds me that the men around me actually live in a completely different country than I do.
( Gentlemen, welcome to my reality )
Ugh. Now that I've realized this, I'm probably going to have to do something about it. You know, being cheerfully oblivious of gender discrimination is so much easier than telling your friends that they're being sexists. |
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| I'm oooold |
[Sep. 5th, 2008|09:16 am] |
My smallish hometown had no middle school, so the high school went from grades seven to thirteen. By the last year of high school, the grade sevens started to look like they belonged in a nursery school. As I head out to do an AEMMA demo at the University of Toronto clubs fair, it occurs to me that the current crop of frosh were in nursery school when I was in grade 13. It's time I graduated already. |
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| ISMAC |
[Aug. 8th, 2008|01:07 pm] |
As promised, here’s my report on the International Sword Martial Arts Convention.
( Three days of swordy fun )
I’m definitely planning to go to the convention again next year. It’s a shame that it conflicts with the Ottawa Medieval Sword Guild’s camping weekend, but the learning experience is just tremendous. However, next year I’m bringing a camping cooler and my own food. |
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| Still alive |
[Aug. 5th, 2008|05:23 pm] |
I spent the weekend at the International Sword Martial Arts Convention in Detroit, where I took roughly 21 hours of classes and did some sparring to boot. It was excellent. Detroit is disturbing. I plan to write a proper convention report when I'm less exhausted. |
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| An Invitation to Monica Grenfell |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|09:49 pm] |
Dear Monica,
It's been a bit of a challenging week, eh? Here you thought you'd get some good publicity for your crash dieting book by writing a piece in the British Daily Mail saying that plus-sized contestant Chloe Marshall doesn't deserve to be a finalist for the Miss England pageant because her size indicates that she has a "shocking lack of self-control" and she's obviously been overeating. Then all those nasty fat people tried to defame you by pointing out that you call yourself a dietician even though you don't have the academic or professional credentials to do so legally. How unkind of them.
Listen girlfriend, after a week like this, you probably need to unwind. So how about, next time you're in the Toronto area, you drop by the Fighting Arts Collective and have a few friendly bouts of Dog Brothers-style stick fighting. (Or would that be Bitch Sisters-style? Anyways...) You'd like the sport. It takes a lot of fitness and self-control, which you must have in spades because you're skinny.
I know a great partner you can spar against: there's this chick at the Collective who goes by the handle of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) henchminion. You'll cream her for sure. She must be slow and she'll surely burst into tears at the first hit because she's very nearly now the same body mass as Chloe Marshall. Obviously she doesn't work out and she has no self control. Besides, everyone knows that extra body mass is a real disadvantage when it comes to giving and taking hits. That's why special forces soldiers and UFC fighters are all bony and stuff.
So yeah! Anytime, sweetheart. Have your people call my people and we'll set it up.
Love and hugs,
Henchminion |
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| AEMMA on the Mercer report |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|04:22 pm] |
Last week, Rick Mercer dropped by the AEMMA display at the Royal Ontario Museum and got some footage of a bit of arming sword freeplay. Keep an eye on the Mercer Report tonight to see what he does with it. |
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| Why I love the Fighting Arts Collective |
[Jan. 12th, 2008|06:41 pm] |
Yesterday, I walked past a copy of Charles Stross' new novel The Merchants' War at the Bakka-Phoenix bookstore. It took me about half a minute to realize that the image on the cover is supposed to be surprisingly incongruous.
To me, men in medieval armour carrying assault rifles look like part of a typical Sunday afternoon at FACT, when the tactical airsoft guys start sharing their toys with the historical European martial artists.
This morning, as I was doing a Jeet Kune Do class on the mezzanine, Aldo and Jack were sparring with longswords on the floor, and some acrobats who have recently started renting space from the Collective were winding themselves up in scarves dangling from the high ceiling. It's a wonderful, surreal place.
This year the FACT open house will be on Sunday, January 27th starting at 2-ish. We've laid in a supply of straw mats, so unlike last year there will indeed be the opportunity to cut stuff up with sharp swords. There will also be demos by all of the martial arts schools, chili and beer, hopefully in that order. Come one, come all! |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 7th, 2007|02:55 pm] |
I'm back from summer camp in the Gatineau Hills.
This year, I learned that it is possible to stuff three adults with fighting and camping gear into a Pontiac Grand Am, to fight a swordsman when carrying just a dagger, and to build a campfire hot enough to melt beer bottles.
Pictures will surely follow. |
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| Note to self |
[May. 27th, 2007|10:34 pm] |
Never attempt to use your face as a bludgeon. The results aren't pretty.
At the fight club today, Kel and Aldo's light armoured freeplay got into grappling range and Kel decided to try a head-butt. Unfortunately, he used his forehead instead of the top of his head, which latter option is the way the Jeet Kune Do guys teach you to do it.
Now the thing about a fencing mask is that it is in many ways like a cheese grater. That is to say that part of Kel's forehead is now cross-hatched hamburger. Last I saw, it was still bleeding impressively an hour and a half after the incident.
No word yet on how Kel's wife, the formidable Maryanne, reacted. Aldo is rumoured to have joined the witness protection programme. |
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| Your Middle English word of the day |
[May. 15th, 2007|04:00 pm] |
Today my favourite word (well, two words) are koc stappis, or cock-steps. It comes from a footwork drill in the MS Harleian 3542, a rather cryptic fifteenth-century text about English longsword training.*
Ever notice how, when a chicken walks, its toes hit the ground before its heels do? I think the point of the expression was to remind sword students to keep their weight on the balls of their feet rather than their heels.
Popular culture portrays ancient swordmasters as men of gravitas with profound spiritual insights. In actual practice, it seems they went around saying things like "Son, when you're in danger, always remember to walk like a chicken." I love it.
*Credit for the translation is due to lifegivingsword, who recently edited the section of the MS on swordfighting. |
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| Wild-eyed medievalists |
[Feb. 16th, 2007|01:26 am] |
I'd tell you what I was up to yesterday, but larkvi's version is funnier.
The backdrop for our sword-banging was the Great Hall of Hart House, with a fire burning in the fireplace behind us. It should make for an awesome video. |
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