Hi,

Last week I released MS 2031, my edition of a previously unpublished seventeenth-century Italian rapier manuscript.

Since then I’ve fixed a formatting error that crept into the paid version, so if you bought it last week, you can download the corrected version from the shop. (You should already have got an email about it from me.) The free facsimile, transcription, and translation (which you can find on my blog) were all unaffected, which is exactly the wrong way round!

With MS 2031 out in the world, I’ve been able to turn my attention back to some of the other things that have been waiting patiently in the wings.

The Duel of the Hat

The Duel of the Hat has reached an important milestone: the second draft is finished, and I’ve sent it off to the editor (of DOOM!). It was at that weird stage where it didn’t need a great deal done to it, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough to actually fix it. MS 2031 wiped my Hat slate clean, and it only took a couple of days to finish the draft.

This is the story of a duel fought in France sometime around 1597, involving a satirical verse, a very fine hat, and some spectacularly bad decisions. What started as an attempt to reconstruct the fight itself has grown into a much larger investigation of the people involved, the circumstances that brought them to the duelling ground, and what the surviving accounts can actually tell us about what happened there.

Sending a book to an editor is a particular pleasure. For the moment, it’s somebody else’s problem!