I haven’t posted much for a long time, and life had me very busy with non-HEMA things, but I have completed something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: A new translation of MS I.33. I will copy from the foreword of my work:

“This work would not have been possible without the work done by Dieter Bachmann and Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng on their respective transcriptions and translations of MS I.33. Their works provided helpful reference throughout the process of this work, as well as providing me years of studying MS I.33 through reading their works. Also, all scans of the manual are courtesy of and copyright of the Royal Armouries, being used for non-commercial and personal use. I am making this work freely available and give permission for anyone to use it freely and share it with others, so long as they do not modify it (without permission) or claim it as their own.

The goal of this translation is to provide an attempt at a literal or 1-to-1 translation of the text. What this means is that I have attempted to translate each word as literally as possible, and have tried to preserve the original order of the sentences and such as much as possible while still being readable and making sense in English. In translating the words, where possible I have tried to use an English word which has the same root word as the Latin word (ex. ‘conduct’ for ‘duco’). With this sort of translation, there are flaws and drawbacks. As any translator knows, often the ‘literal’ translation will not be the best translation of the meaning and intent of the text. I am fully aware of the flaws that come with this kind of translation, and make no claims as to this work being a ‘best’ translation of the original text. For that, I would defer to people much more experienced and qualified than I am, such as Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, whose translation has been the standard for I.33. The purpose of this work was simply to gain better personal understanding of the text, as well as provide an updated free translation for people to use, as Dieter Bachmann’s translation has some typos and inconsistencies, and has not been updated for several years.”

And finally, here is the download link for the PDF:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9or3jnmv7ave8r2/I_33_Joey_Nitti_Translation.pdf?dl=0