Guy Windsor - The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest: Philippo Vadis De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi with an Introduction, Translation, Commentary, and Glossary

Ms Vitt. Em. 1324, known as De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, is a small illustrated treatise composed in the late fifteenth century by Philippo Vadi, which survives in one known copy dedicated to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. It covers combat on foot with the sword, with the spear and with the dagger, both in and out of armour. I published a translation, transcription and commentary of this manuscript in 2012, titled Veni Vadi Vici. The book you are holding is the revised second edition of Veni Vadi Vici, which went through so many changes that I have gone so far as to re-title it. In this edition, I have provided an introduction, which briefly surveys the history of recreating historical European martial arts, and covers everything currently known about Vadi himself and the provenance and structure of his book; it also covers key details regarding the dedicatee, and it has some notes on Italian fencing terms of the fifteenth century. This is followed by a complete translation (correcting the errors in the first edition), and a section of commentary giving my perspective on the text as a modern swordsman and researcher. And finally, this edition includes a glossary of the main technical fencing terms that Vadi used.

The purpose of this book is to provide a useful resource to practitioners of medieval and Renaissance Italian swordsmanship, enabling them to recreate Vadis art with confidence, and to provide a new light with which to view other Italian sources. To make this book accessible to a general reader (and to swordsmanship beginners) I have included some introductory material that will be unnecessary to an experienced practitioner, but I think it better to err on the side of providing too much help rather than too little. This edition will also be useful to scholars of the quattrocento, especially as an example of research through practice.

Not a great deal is known about De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi or its author, and it does not appear to have been very influential in its time. It survives in only one manuscript which lay forgotten by everyone except a few manuscript collectors from the time it was written until quite recently, when a surge of interest in the lost martial arts of Europe brought it to light. This surge was part of a larger pattern: beginning in the late 1980s, there has been a revival of interest in recreating medieval and Renaissance arts of various kinds. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the Shakespeares Globe theatre, which was opened in 1997 close to the site of the original theatre. Not content with recreating the physical theatre, the Globes organisers are now offering performances with the original pronunciation (or as close to it as scholarship can develop). Similarly, contemporary musicians have recorded classical, baroque and medieval music on reproductions of historical instruments, which sound very different to their modern counterparts. There is an entire academic/musical field now assembled under the umbrella of Historically Informed Performance. The process requires musicological scholarship, but also high-level practical skills in playing, and a restoration of the ancient arts of instrument-making. To some extent then, the movement to recreate historical martial arts is part of a larger trend.

There was a previous revival of the old martial arts of Europe that occurred in the late nineteenth century, and which required a similar mix of academic and practical skills. With the Victorian nostalgia for the old ways, scholars and classical fencers such as Alfred Hutton, Egerton Castle and Cyril Matthey discovered treatises on fencing dating back to the sixteenth century. Using those treatises, they recreated the systems of combat they found within and organised public demonstrations of the new, old, art. This movement eventually ran out of steam, but it left behind several excellent books such as Castles Schools and Masters of Fence (1892), Mattheys edition of George Silvers Brief Instructions on my Paradoxes of Defence (1898), Huttons The Sword and the Centuries (1901), and others. Classical fencing (with foil, epe and sabre) remained and developed into the modern sport.

Late in the twentieth century, with the Victorianss legacy as a starting point, various groups in Europe and the Americas began again to recreate these arts. The earliest glimmerings of this trend with regard to swordsmanship can be seen in Turner and Sopers 1990 book, Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay, which reproduces and compares three English-language fencing treatises from the late 1500s. By 1992, the first publishing company dedicated to the subject was founded: Chivalry Bookshelf began with a quarterly magazine, but by 1996 was producing books aimed at the historical swordsmanship practitioner. Other notable publications in the field at this time were Terry Browns 1997 English Martial Arts and, a year later, Medieval Swordsmanship, by John Clements. The idea of accurately recreating historical swordsmanship styles from existing texts had hit a nerve. Groups began springing up independently of each other: when I founded the Edinburgh-based Dawn Duellists Society in 1994, I had no idea that there were people in other countries interested in the same pursuit.

With the help of the newly-available internet, local, national and international bodies began to form (such as the British Federation for Historical Swordplay