You can’t learn swordfighting from a book, with Dr. Antti Ijäs

The Sword Guy Podcast

For transcriptions and more detailed shownotes, please go to: https://swordschool.com/podcast/you-cant-learn-swordfighting-from-a-book-with-dr-antti-ijas/

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Dr. Antti Ijäs is a grant-funded researcher, whose recent doctoral dissertation is a scholarly examination of Royal Armouries MS I.33 and includes a complete transcription and translation of the entire manuscript. In our conversation we talk about 1.33 as the first, complete, fight book and its position in the wider fencing context of the time. We compare it to later sources but also talk about much earlier ones, all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. Antti has written an article, Greek Papyri of Pragmatic Literature on Combat Technique (P. Oxy. III 466 and LXXIX 5204) about two papyri fragments of a book on wrestling. Which of course leads us on to talking about Ancient Greek sex manuals…

Changing the subject, Antti is also a practitioner of bayonet fencing, and we talk about the development of competing methods in Europe, with the Swedes, Prussians and Saxons (and others) each coming up with their own systems.