I have long heard that ballet has its origins in historical fencing. It's a romantic idea and as someone who both teaches martial arts and dance (though not ballet) I certainly find tons of parallels in how they are both taught and practiced. The positions of modern ballet certainly bare some resemblance to classical and…
Read More... from Is There a Link Between Ballet and Fencing?
Recently, I was asked why we teach rapier and longsword together in our Instructor Intensives. The questioner postulated that it was like teaching sky diving and skin diving in the same program. Sure rapiers and longswords are both swords but aren't they as distinct as these two types of "diving"? I think it's a great…
Read More... from An Argument for Training with Diverse Weapons, Part 1
In the 1650s, a German speaking student attended the knight academy at Sorø in Eastern Denmark. There he studied under fencing master Wilhelm Schöffer von Dietz, a known student of fencing master Salvator Fabris (whose manual is a core source for rapier instruction at Academie Duello and to the Italian tradition in general). In his…
Whenever a new historical drama breaks we tend to question its historical authenticity, and that’s a good thing. However even with a critical eye unfortunately we invariably end up internalising something of the narrative and this can have lasting consequences for our understanding of history. Anyone in historical martial arts can relate to this, whether…
Read More... from Vikings: An interview with archaeologist Stephen Fox
"Every society has needed licensed channels for the overflow of destructive impulses. Duelling reduced such feuds to symbolic proportions, confined them to individuals, and required only a limited number of victims". [1] Duelling bad! Very, very bad! In The Duel in European History, Marxist social-historian Kiernan offers us a wide variety of duelling stories and…
Read More... from Book Review: The Duel in European History by Kiernan
There is a fallacy that is often presented in martial arts (and physical culture as a whole) that for people on the outside looking in there is no point to practicing. Why learn to fight with a sword, choke a person out, or lift a heavy weight if those things do not translate to a…
Read More... from Why you should wrestle, and everyone throughout history thought so as well!
@octaypus forwarded along a very cool diagram of the evolution of swords, looking primarily at their hilts and grips, throughout the centuries. It is a very cool diagram that I felt was worth passing along. Ahh the display we could make with just a few more swords in our museum!