Dante’s devised this scheme to re-focus the local Italianate fencers on the fundamentals of theory and form instead of plate replication. The textbook for the experiment would be Leoni’s Fabris, which we all have access to. The available guards were limited to extended quarta for single sword, and a withdrawn terza for dagger.

Reading:

Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17

Dagger work pages 83-92

Guards:

Plate 14, 60

I realize that a lot of the intro stuff is old hat, but please reread

it with an eye to culling out anything from your prior knowledge that

isn’t present in that material.

The two plates offer one guard for single sword, and one for sword and

dagger. I consider anything that you can execute from either of these

guards to be fair game for the purposes of this experiment as long as

the initial moment of stillness is one of those two positions. I chose

ones that are versatile enough to cover the inside and outside lines,

as well as use the lunge, the pass, and the girata.

As you fence, be sure to stay in one of those two guards. During the

course of your bouts, please pay attention to how you react to your

opponents (other people will need to be your test subjects, though the

Giganti adherents can do that job as well if need be) and consider if

those reactions are in keeping with the theory, or in violation. The

goal should be to whittle down to being 100% in keeping with the

theory, and applying it however is useful from either guard at a given

moment. It that happens to mean a passing step, sword beat, and a

dagger in the groin right then, go for it.

I will need each of you to do some form of moderate journaling in the

form of “X is the ideal. I did X-N. I can make the value of N smaller

by…” This can be broad, specific, or some mixture of the two. I’d like

to get biweekly reports, though these don’t need to be terribly

elaborate.