Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Michael Chidester, who is the architect of Wiktenauer, the online archive of historical martial arts sources. He’s also the founder of HEMA Bookshelf, which produces stunningly good facsimiles of historical sources, such as the Getty manuscript of Fiore dei Liberi’s Il Fior di Battaglia, and also produces a whole bunch of academic books on historical martial arts as well. He has appeared on the show before in Episode 21, a long time ago. So listeners unfamiliar with his work should go back and listen to that one too. So, without further ado, Michael, welcome back.
Michael Chidester
Thank you. It’s good to be back, Guy.
Guy Windsor
It’s good to see you.
Michael Chidester
It’s been like, what, four or five years since the last one?
Guy Windsor
It was episode 21, I was doing them weekly, and we started in June to 2020 so would have been end of 2020 I think maybe beginning of 2021.
Michael Chidester
Three or four years, I can’t do the math.
Guy Windsor
So we will be talking about the stuff you’ve been doing since then. But because many people have not been listening to the show since the beginning, and haven’t diligently gone through and listened to every single episode since the very start, because that is hundreds of hours of material. So fair enough. Just to warrant everybody, whereabouts in the world are you?
Michael Chidester
I am in Medford, Massachusetts, right outside Boston.
Guy Windsor
Okay.
Michael Chidester
No one’s ever heard of Medford, but it’s adjacent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which more people have heard of.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, because they, they sort of tried to copy the original Cambridge and put a university there, but I’ve heard it’s not very good.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, there’s a couple schools there that are all right, I don’t know if people have heard of them. I think one is called Harvard and the other one is an Institute of Technology of some sort.
Guy Windsor
Isn’t that where they train electricians and people to fix your car.
Michael Chidester
I think that’s what that means.
Guy Windsor
You have to understand, I was there in the original bridge. Yeah, I was born in the original Cambridge, which is literally, there’s a bridge over the River Cam. There are now several. So it is the River Cam and then the bridge over it, and then they had a town around it, and they started a university there about 1000 years ago. Not quite 1000 years.
Michael Chidester
So it’s old, is what you’re saying. Somewhat degraded.
Guy Windsor
Well, I didn’t go to university there. I was just born there, and I happen to live an hour away from it now.
Michael Chidester
It’s true, they missed a step, because there is a river going through Cambridge, but it’s called the Charles River, and not the Cam. So if they just sort of crossed that T it would have been a lot neater.
Guy Windsor
So really the Charles Bridge universities. Nah. No, okay, so banter about how Americans come late to every party aside. How did you get into historical martial arts?
Michael Chidester
So I started when I was 18. I was a freshman in college, about three weeks into my first semester, and I had heard a story from people in the cafeteria that there was a bunch of weirdos with swords in a park somewhere near the university. And I thought that sounds like my kind of thing. I want to learn how to sword fight. And I discovered some weirdos with swords in a park, which ended up being the Provo Utah branch of HACA, the Historical Armed Combat Association, which was the precursor, well, really the same organization as ARMA, but they wouldn’t rename themselves ARMA until the following year. So at the time, it was HACA, and that’s where I met Jake Norwood, who was teaching the club at the time. He had been, I think he’s been on your podcast, hasn’t he?
Guy Windsor
He certainly has.
Michael Chidester
Yeah. I think he’d been training for about six months at that time, but this is how HEMA goes, right? The person with the most experience, whatever it is, is in charge. And then I learned later on that that was actually the wrong group of weirdos, and there was a different park with different sword people who were LARPers, who were actually being referred to there. So purely by chance, I ended up with historical fencing, as opposed to LARP as a freshman in college. That was 2001 and I’ve been doing it more or less ever since. So my 23rd anniversary just passed in September, although I don’t know what day it was, because back then, we didn’t have durable records like Google Calendar, so we could see when we were going places.
Guy Windsor
You did, you had stuff written down on pieces of paper. And I actually still have some diaries, calendars from 2000.
Michael Chidester
I don’t, I don’t even have the same email that I had in 2001 so I can’t reconstruct more than it was a Tuesday or Wednesday in late September.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough. So just for people who haven’t listened to Episode 21 what is Wiktenauer and how did it start?
Michael Chidester
So Wiktenauer is an online sort of information base that’s built on a wiki like Wikipedia, and we’re slowly endeavouring to catalogue and include the full text of every historical fencing treatise from, at the moment, it’s mostly Europe and the Middle East. I mean, someday the sky is the limit. But it started in 2009. It was started by a guy named Ben Michaels, who was also one of the drivers behind Longpoint in the 2010s and is a good friend and was the student of Jake Norwood. So that’s how I got involved. He had this idea that he was tired of all these online arguments on forums, back when there were still forums, about interpretations that were based on bad reads and incomplete understanding of historical sources. So he had this concept that if there was a place where every single description of each technique was placed side by side, then it would be easy to tell whose interpretation was correct and whose interpretation was wrong.
Guy Windsor
No.
Michael Chidester
If not end all the arguments, at least make it clear who was wrong in every argument. And guess what? That didn’t work. He started doing that, and he discovered, actually, no, there is not agreement in the sources about any of this stuff, and also agreement in translations. And just sort of opened a can of worms he didn’t expect. And then he soon lost interest in the project and was going to delete it. But I was involved at that point.
Guy Windsor
Hang on, he was going to delete it. So you’re not just the architect of Wiktenauer, you are the saviour of Wiktenauer.
Michael Chidester
I made it stay so in 2009…
Guy Windsor
Every single historical martial artist on the planet owes you a beer. That is a lifetime’s worth of beer.
Michael Chidester
Well, thanks. In 2009, November 12 is our official birthday, because he sent an email out to 16 people who he’d encountered in the wild or who Jake had recommended, including me, and said, hey, I’m working on this thing. And you want, if you want to come and help, we would like people to appreciate contributions, blah, blah, blah, mostly people who had done translations and transcriptions, and most people, including me, were like, that’s a cool idea. I don’t have time to help. But, you know, feel free to take anything that I’ve already written and put it on there, which actually became our default model for Wiktenauer is it’s rare that people do work for the wiki, but many people are happy to do work, and then later on, have us import it into the wiki.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, you’ve got my Vadi translation.
Michael Chidester
We do. We’ve had multiple iterations too. I remember you gave us one, and then a few years later, said, please, please, please, put this better translation on. Yes, that’s right. I don’t want my name attached to that first draft. It’s awful, and so we have that much better translation now. Thank you. I think at one point we had some bits of Fiore translation you did as well. Although the Fiore article has been through so many versions.
Guy Windsor
I have completed my translation of Fiore this year, and I will happily send it over so you can have another one to add to the list, if you like.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, let’s come back to that question, because there’s Wiktenauer developments there. So anyway, that’s the origin of Wiktenauer. 2010 is when I broke my leg in a skydiving accident. And I had sort of poked around at the wiki before that, but then I had a whole summer in which I was bedridden because I had a fractured femur, and so I started working on Wiktenauer as a way to pass the hours.
Guy Windsor
So jolly good thing you broke your leg.
Michael Chidester
Ben Michaels has joked that HEMA’s advancement is usually based on my personal injuries. I started studying Fiore in 2006 because I broke my arm and couldn’t fence for a while. It was my left arm, but I couldn’t do longsword. All I could do was single hand sword. And I found Fiore’s sword in one hand, and started playing with that as the most accessible single hand sword source I had access to. And all of my Fiore studies kind of go from there. I grabbed Matt Easton’s translation and the Knights of the Wild Rose translation. So, yeah, I get injured, and then I have free time, and then I do stuff people like.
Guy Windsor
So what I’m thinking is I need to drop by Medford, Massachusetts, with a baseball bat. I think if things start to slack on the Wiktenauer, definitely leave the arms alone, because you need to type. But you can afford a tibia, maybe.
Michael Chidester
Wiktenauer changed when I took over, because I was not interested in techniques at all. I mean, obviously, but not technique pages, and I knew that model was flawed, so I just started cataloguing. And I didn’t know that anybody else had done any cataloguing before, because it wasn’t on the internet and I couldn’t find it. Later on, I found some bits and pieces of work from like the 80s and the 60s that I incorporated, and just started putting together information pages and then piling transcriptions and translations on, and slowly started building up just all the free stuff that was already out there that I could get permission for. Adding manual scans. And over time, it got more polished and more developed and more professional looking, although it’s still sort of slipshod in some ways. And so for the past 14 years, it’s just been that process of development.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, it’s a stunning piece of work. When I think what we would have given for that in 1995 I would have, yeah, my God.
Michael Chidester
I mean, we are just now breaking into the 1600s. Finally, after 15 years.
Guy Windsor
Oh, you’re going to have Capoferro on there?
Michael Chidester
We do have Capoferro on there already. We’ve got some of the big rapier ones, but there’s lots of small ones. I started off doing whatever shotgun, whatever I could find that was free. And then several, many years ago, and that was like the first year or two after that, I went back to the beginning and started trying to cover everything in order. So we’ve got everything to the end of the 16th century, more or less in a state that that we can get it to.
Guy Windsor
Everything that’s being discovered.
Michael Chidester
People are always doing new translations, and, well, not as often as they used to, but they still things come out and they get added back in. So we have to go back and revise quite a bit, which slows us down. But now, starting last year, really, we started working more heavily on the 17th century. And someday it’ll be the 18th century, maybe 10 more years, but you contributed to that as well, with the Fabris, last year. That was a good one.
Guy Windsor
So for the listeners who don’t know what we’re talking about. I went to the Wallace Collection, where they had a copy of an early 20th century translation of Fabris, and I photographed the whole thing and sent the photographs to Michael, who then transcribed them. So there was a out of copyright translation into English of Fabris, which, to be honest, isn’t the best translation in the world, but a free translation you can actually read is better than a perfect translation that you can’t get access to because it’s wildly expensive.
Michael Chidester
Yes, exactly. And I mean, I think having more than one translation, having at least two, is always better than one, in my opinion, because that way you can try to account for translator voice as much as possible, and this is maybe a whole philosophical discussion about interpretation, but to me, if what we’re trying to learn is what the master said and not what a modern, 21st century person says, you can either learn the original language, or you can start laying translation side by side and looking for what’s different and what’s the same, and work it that way. And if all you speak is English, that’s what you have available to you. So as soon as you have two translations, that’s when interpretation starts getting interesting.
Guy Windsor
Although, that is fraught with problems, because I have a few translations out, and one person was continually emailing me with questions as to why my translation was different to this other person’s translation, and it was quite clear that this other person didn’t really understand Italian at all. Making really fundamental, basic translation errors. We all go through that process, but in the end, I was just like, look, I’m not going to comment on it. This is my translation, by all means compare it to the original language if you want. But I’m not going to be put in the position of having to critique another person’s work. And particularly when you know it just, it just was not a good translation. So it’s awkward, because someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, they may be looking at a really good translation and a really bad translation, and they may prefer elements of the bad translation and so incorporate all sorts of rubbish. It’s tricky.
Michael Chidester
And that’s why going back to the original is always best. I mean, for me, so I’ve done a few translations myself, and one of something I do that a lot of translators don’t bother with, is I try to reconstruct everybody else’s translations as part of my process. So I want to know not just why they disagree with me, but I try to figure out what the hell they were thinking a lot of the time. And that’s just a step I go through when I do it, but it’s a lot of extra work if what you want is to just read the book. I recognize that. That the person you’re speaking about has put out some other translations.
Guy Windsor
I don’t know that we’re talking about the same thing because I’d never heard of this person.
Michael Chidester
There’s a Getty translation that I read recently that I was anyways, I don’t want to bad mouth anybody else. If you ask me what translations I recommend, I won’t be on the list, but that’s about all I can say. And you know, I’ll take it to private messages and point out specific things if people want to quibble, I’m happy to quibble, but I was very dismayed anyways. But okay with Fabris, we finally have a free translation, and that’s what it’s all about. Because people in HEMA are not just interested in taking a book and reading it. They want to make videos, they want to put together blog posts, they want to possibly write interpretation books. And all of that requires taking off and taking someone else’s copyrighted translation and using it, either with or without permission. So as soon as we can get free use stuff, even if it’s modern, if it’s licensed for free use. That opens up a world of resources that wouldn’t be available otherwise.
Guy Windsor
All of my translation stuff is free with A non-commercial Creative Commons, share alikes. It’s a restricted license so that they have to acknowledge where it comes from. They can’t change it, and they can’t make money off it, but then they can quote it in videos. They can quote it in blog posts. They can put it in books. I don’t mind. They don’t have to ask for permission. It’s just out there, because the original work is our sort of communal birthright, and I think being able to read it is, should also be sort of communal birthright. I don’t like putting my translations behind a paywall, but my interpretations. That’s how I make my living.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, and I’m right there with you all of my stuff. In fact, a lot of my stuff ends up on Wiktenauer. I usually wait a space for people who bought the book to have early access. But it all goes up eventually, because I want people to both benefit from it and also improve upon it. And you know, it’s giving back and also just making things people didn’t know about more easily available. The Fabris translation, to go back to that. I found a copy of Hammerterz’s Forum magazine. I don’t know if you ever saw that? Chris Amberger’s Hema fanzine?
Guy Windsor
Yes! I forgot the name of it, but yes.
Michael Chidester
I have a spiral bound, cheap photocopy of the entire print run of it for historical purposes, but a few people are quoting from that translation in the late 90s, which means people had it and knew about it, and it never went anywhere for 20 odd years, that it was just sitting on a shelf, and people who had it didn’t share. So we have this free, public domain English translation that everybody’s kind of sitting on, if they even know it exists, for decades. And that’s the kind of thing that Wiktenauer is meant to solve, is make it so there’s no profit in that. There’s no benefit to anybody. Because, when we get free stuff, it just goes up, and maybe not immediately, because I’m busy sometimes, but as soon as I can get to it, just because, imagine the Fabris community, the Rapier community, if that translation had been available from 1997. Instead of 2022 or 23.
Guy Windsor
I think Tom’s came out in 2006 which is what kind of kick started the whole Fabris thing. But that’s nine years people could have been working on a, perhaps a less good translation, but at least they could have been working with Fabris.
Michael Chidester
I don’t know if Tom saw this translation when he was doing his but he could have come along and offered a better one to a community that already knew about Fabris, and moved us along much faster. Having resources is the first step to doing anything, and that’s what I think the value of Wiktenauer is. Most people aren’t interested in the deep codicology of it all. But just like being able to look at the book, even in an imperfect way, is far better than nothing, although the really bad translations I do try to try to push people to improve. A few over the years that really needed to go away, and they all have at this point.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and I wrote one of them. So there we go. That’s why I have no animosity towards people who are producing bad translations, because you produced bad translations on the way to producing good ones. When someone has put in the effort and done the work to produce any translation, that’s worthy of praise and support. It’s just before it gets adopted it needs to be critiqued and improved, and made better.
Michael Chidester
As long as people are willing to accept feedback, then it’ll always improve.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Now. You’re currently producing a transcription and translation of Fiore’s Getty manuscript, correct? Now is that basically the same project we talked about in a car in Seattle in about 2018 which sparked off my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series?
Michael Chidester
Yeah, we were sitting on Neal Stevenson’s terrace before Sword Squatch, and I think multiple times later in the weekend, we talked about how useful it would be to have a new Getty translation.
Guy Windsor
But one that’s available with a non-commercial license.
Michael Chidester
To compliment what was already on Wiktenauer. We have Colin Hatcher’s translation, which was the first complete Getty translation that anyone’s done, if I recall correctly, and it’s fine, but you and I both have disagreements with it, and we were like, we can make our own. And at the time, I think what I said to you is, I don’t want this just be Fiore according to Michael Chidester, I want to have multiple voices. And so we talked about collaborating, and then the feedback I got from people was no, no, no, no, no. I hate multiple voices. It’s just confusing. I mentioned before I like to put translations side by side and see how the translators are speaking differently. But most people, apparently don’t have the bandwidth to try and separate the translator’s voice from the author’s voice. And when they see a word difference, they assume it’s an original difference and not Christian Trasclare and Corey Winslow translate this word differently. And so they were like, no, this is the most confusing thing. Is we’re never sure if the difference is in the text or the differences in the translation. So please do it all by the same translator. So you had already started your project long before I got around to my end of it. And I’ve been doing it and I’ve been working not just on the Getty, but also on the Pisani Dossi and the Morgan so I can certify that anytime there’s differences in the translation, it is in the Italian and not the English. And I’ve also been working closely with Rebecca Garber and Kendra Brown on a new Paris translation. Which I’m trying to sort of minimize the authorial voice difference there as well, at least in terms of terminology, so you can compare it to mine and say, all right, well, here, they’re clearly going off in a different direction. But these words are the same.
Guy Windsor
Just to clarify for people who maybe aren’t familiar with all the manuscripts of Il Fior di Battaglia that survive. The Paris is in Latin. It’s the latest one that was found. It’s also probably the latest one that was written after Fiore’s death in maybe 1430 something like that. And the Getty is the one everyone knows best, and that’s in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Pisani Dossi is sealed in a secret, private vault owned by the Pisani Dossi family, where it’s been since forever. And we mostly work from a facsimile that was produced in, I think, 1903 was it by Francesco Novati.
Michael Chidester
Guy Windsor
- Thank you, Michael. So yeah. So there are lots of different versions of the same book, and they’re all different because they’re manuscripts produced differently.
Michael Chidester
My favourite copy is in the Morgan library in New York City. Yeah, at this point, I’ve been to visit the three that are visitable.
Guy Windsor
I hate you.
Michael Chidester
And truly, no one alive has seen the Pisani Dossi. I only know of one person in the historical fencing world who’s seen it, Brian Stokes. He was allowed to photograph it, and the family has not been receptive to anybody else visiting ever after. So I’ve seen his photos of it. He had them printed out in a gigantic poster book, it’s not available. The Getty Museum has a copy of it in their archives, and he will show it to you in person, but he says he signed an agreement to not distribute it, so all he can do is let you look at his copy.
Guy Windsor
Fucking assholes. What is the fucking matter with these people? It’s like, why does everyone go to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, because it’s, I mean, it’s by no means the best painting in the Louvre. It is probably Da Vinci’s worst work. And it is a drab little painting of a drab little woman. It’s hanging on the wall constantly surrounded by billions of tourists, because they’ve all seen it everywhere on tea towels and mugs and posters and everywhere else, because it was stolen back in the early 20th century. Making pictures of it available makes your thing more valuable, not less valuable. Fuck. So I want to go down and stab them with daggers until they change their minds.
Michael Chidester
I’m not going to defend them, but my understanding is they don’t care about history, and they don’t actually care about the context of the manuscript to them, because Carlo Pisani Dossi was a descendant of the de Este family. He bought the manuscript as a piece of his family history. So to them, it’s just a book dedicated to their ancestor, and they don’t care what’s in it, and that’s why that informs their decision. It’s just a family treasure, I don’t think it’s a good posture, but it kind of makes sense to them. They don’t understand it. They just know what’s on the first page is their ancestor’s name, so they don’t have any incentive to help us out. And maybe someday there’ll be a new head of the family who has a different attitude. I hope.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, we can make a new head of the family. I mean, if we just assassinate the current eldest people in the family, so somebody young and persuadable is suddenly in charge. Honestly, I think Fiore would approve of a little judicious assassination. No?
Michael Chidester
I was able to take his to take Brian’s pictures and look at the transcription, and look at the some of the artifacts and the facsimile, and recognize plays. So that was helpful.
Guy Windsor
How good is it? Are there errors in the facsimile?
Michael Chidester
The Novati facsimile is very faithful. There are errors. Like, there’s a place where there’s a spear that appears to have a cross piece, and that’s just an artifact in the picture, in the scan of it, the photo. There’s a few places like that that I’ve noted, but by and large, the art was not manipulated. The main difference is the reproduction technology they use sort of overexposed it, so all the black lines are thicker and darker than they are in the original. It actually has a much lighter pen, more akin to the to the other manuscripts. So the facsimile is a little bit ugly in that way, and the actual manuscript is not but as far as I can tell, there was no redrawing, and there was no attempt at intentional manipulation of the pictures at all. It is the way it is. It’s just nicer.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that is such a relief. So we can trust Novati.
Michael Chidester
Yes. The main difference is, there’s colour in the manuscript. In a few places, there’s red ink. The border on the first page has nice green and blue ink, like flowers and stuff. And also, there’s a few places where there are details in the art that, because the lines are so, so thick, they just disappear, you know, someone’s hand just disappears into shadows. But those are minor. The weird things in the Novati facsimile, the weirdest stuff that I wish were errors, turn out to be exactly like the manuscript, like the bicorno that’s different from the other bicornos. It’s just different.
Guy Windsor
So Brian photographed the whole thing. Okay. Also, a meteor could hit the Pisani Dossi house and destroy the whole thing. So we have not just a Novati, but we have ways of assessing the accuracy of the Novati from the pictures. I am much relieved.
Michael Chidester
If Italy falls into the sea, then at least Brian’s copy exists. And I guess people can try and go visit Brian to see it if they need to, okay, but I think that’s the only way you ever get access to it.
Guy Windsor
Fair enough, but let’s not dox Brian on the internet. Because if we publish his address and everyone goes oh, can we see your Pisani Dossi? That might be a little bit awkward. I think he would not be grateful.
Michael Chidester
You’ll have to make contact yourself.
Guy Windsor
Did he do a collation of the manuscript?
Michael Chidester
He did not. I asked him about it, and he was not able to provide any useful information about that. I suspect that it might be cut leaves like the Morgan, based on his not grasping even the nature of my question about folds and so on. But Brian’s not a manuscript guy. He’s a Fiore guy. So he’s not deep in the codicology, and maybe it just didn’t occur to him, so I don’t know.
Guy Windsor
Now, one of the things that makes your facsimiles the best I’ve ever encountered, ever, is the way you reproduce collation. So that the listener, who may not know what collation is, understands what’s going on, could just explain to us what it is, why it matters, and how you deal with it.
Michael Chidester
To go to basic principles, a manuscript historically has made of parchment, right? Paper doesn’t really become common until the late 14th century into the 15th and parchment is not paper. Parchment is animal skin. It’s basically a really strange leather and so every time you want to make a manuscript, you have to slaughter animals and turn their skin into parchment. And usually it’s a sheep or a goat or a young cow, which happen to have skins about the same size. And when you take a skin and you stretch it out and you make a big rectangle out of it, you can cut it into four smaller pieces of parchment and fold them in half, and get eight pages that are roughly A4 size. If you ever wondered about the paper sizes that we use today. They’re based on the size of animals 1000 years ago. Eight and a half by 11 is also a similar size, just because the paper industry was based on parchment. So manuscripts, the most basic default manuscript, is made of booklets that have these four folded sheets to make eight leaves or 16 pages. And they take these booklets or bundles and they sew them together to make a thicker book, or sometimes just one. And there’s variation. Different manuscripts will have more or less pages per quire, which is what this booklet is called. And when they get into paper, then there’s no longer restrictions. You’re not working animal by animal. So you can make it as thick or as thin as you want, but they would still usually do 16 pages, which are four folded sheets, and they’ll make bundles of that. Except that that’s the standard rule for things like prayer books that were made in large numbers from like scribe sweatshops. When you get into other genres of book, the rules kind of go out the window, and they can do whatever they want, especially when you get into paper. And looking at that will sometimes tell you stories about how the book is made, just looking at how many pages are in each sewn bundle. But also you can look at it and discover where there are missing pages, and identify where there was once a page here that possibly had writing on it, and try to line that up with places where the text might seem incomplete. And that helps us in fencing manuals, where we can say right here, there’s a discontinuity, and the teaching suddenly changes to a completely different topic. Is that because the writer was giving a stream of consciousness word garbage? Or is it because there’s missing pages? It’s also just sort of interesting in sometimes it can tell you things about the creation process. Like Talhoffer’s 1459 manuscript, which was the first facsimile we did, is 150 leaves. It’s 300 pages in the modern parlance, but manuscripts are usually only numbered on the front side, so you count it by individual sort of sheet of parchment or paper. And I assumed, just based on doing basic math, that it would be 15 groups of five folded sheets each, something like that, but that it would be regular gatherings of sort of 10 pages. And I later on find somebody who’d done a codicological analysis in, I think, Norwegian or Dutch or something that I clearly didn’t find when I was looking. Actually, the facsimile was done and discovered, no, it’s only three gatherings of 20 something folded sheets each, and they’re each different lengths, and there’s missing pages. There’s little page stubs. You can see where there are pages that were cut out of the manuscript. And it’s a completely bizarre way. It’s like three magazines that are bound together into a book, instead of a bunch of much smaller little booklets. And I found a codicology expert on the internet, or my partner, Kendra, did rather, named Eric Kwakkel, who gave a lecture in which he said that usually means that it’s not written by a professional scribe. It’s written by a clerk who is moonlighting as a scribe. Because clerks wouldn’t write in books the way everybody else would, they would write in these thick sheafs of paper that just had a single stitch down the middle. So this long 20 to 30 page quire usually means, or rather, 20 or 30 leaf, 40 to 60 page usually means it’s a clerk, and it usually means they were trying to save money by not hiring a real scribe. So we can learn about Talhoffer and the fact that he didn’t go to a professional to do this. He found a guy who’d do it for cheap to make him a thick book. But it’s a terrible way to make a book when you try and stitch them, because the stitching can’t really hold it very well, and they tend to fall apart quickly. When I made the facsimile that had this quire structure at the bindery I went to, was like, no, we can’t. This is not how books work. Are you sure you want this? And I was like, yeah, figure it out, and they came back with a facsimile of it, and it is not durable.
Guy Windsor
But it’s correct.
Michael Chidester
But it’s correct. And it is how Talhoffer made the book. And he clearly didn’t care that it was a little bit flimsier than usual, if the scribe even knew that. But also, they would put a parchment strip down the middle of the stitching to try and keep the pages from tearing out because of how much weight each of those quires has. So it was a whole completely different construction method than virtually any other fencing manual that we have, and each book has the potential to give us these kinds of stories. I mean, Fiora the collation in the Getty manuscript is a bit odd. The quires are much longer than usual. But looking at that, we can sort of guess where there might be other missing pages, because each quire is a different length, and the Getty famously has a misplaced parchment.
Guy Windsor
Folio 38. It’s in the wrong place.
Michael Chidester
When we look at the collation, and parchment also has a cool thing where it has sides, because animal skin has a has a first side and a not first side. So you can see the difference between them. And you can tell where two pages that were cut into single sheets might have been attached together, because the sides have to match up. And we can tell that there are missing pages in the Getty, because we have this misplaced leaf, and we don’t have a different page that could possibly line up with it, and we can better do that kind of analysis.
Guy Windsor
What do you think is on that missing leaf?
Michael Chidester
That is an interesting question. Let me pull up my collation diagram really quick. I have thought about this before.
Guy Windsor
And you do these amazing collation diagrams, which blow my mind every time you publish one on Patreon, oh my god.
Michael Chidester
They’re mostly on Wiktenauer. So curiously, there’s at least one that was blank. That was because there’s a large empty space of blank pages between the introduction, which is on a single folded sheet, and then there’s several blank sheets. And then the wrestling starts on the sixth one, so one and two is the introduction, and then there’s four blank sheets. So there’s a missing blank sheet there, and there are two sheets in between the pollax and the spear, two missing sheets that we don’t know if they were blank or not, but there could have been all kinds of interesting things there. Because the Getty is the longest manuscript it’s hard to look at any other one and say.
Guy Windsor
It’s the most complete, we think so there’s unlikely that the missing bits would be represented somewhere else, whereas we can reconstruct what’s missing from the Morgan, which has less than half of the book because of the other manuscripts.
Michael Chidester
But yeah, he jumped straight from blinding powder into spear in the Getty manuscript, and there’s two blank pages there. They might have been cut out because they were blank. We don’t know, but they’re definitely blank.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so I’m just flicking through my cheap and cheerful facsimile. I have your beautiful one. So 37v is where the pollax ends and there’s he only uses half of the page for those two trick pollax plays. The rest of that page is blank. And then spear begins on the recto side of 39r and yes, in my edition, at least, I’ve moved folio 38 into its proper place between folios 14 and 15. In the original it’s bound in that completely wrong way.
Michael Chidester
The interesting thing is, so we look at, we can talk about counter leaves, which is, when you have the folded page, there’s two things that are attached together. And when you have a booklet, by the time you get to the outermost leaf, the two things are not related to each other, right? But 38 is bound in this gap, and it might have been put there because someone saw that 27, which is the opposite side of that folded sheet, is missing its companion. But when we look at the rough and smooth sides, 38 and 27 can’t join together because the rough and smooth sides don’t line up, which means 38 is missing its other half, and so is 27 and that means that there’s more missing pages than we might have expected from just looking at what’s on the pages.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything actually missing between 27 and 28 because it’s the end of the Zogho Largo section. And then he says, on the same page as the end of the Zogho Largo he says, and here begin the place, the Zogho Stretto. And the next thing on the next page on 28r, is the beginning of the Zorro Stretto plays. We think. Okay, actually, there could be some Stretto plays missing. Fuck.
Michael Chidester
There could be. So we know that the places where the quires end is 38 which is after 14. 26, and currently 37 so any one of those could have an extra whole gathering missing, but if we expect it to be a regular construction., then there’s six folded sheets, which makes 12 folia in the in three quires, and the fourth one is shorter, so it could have a missing outer page or one missing in the middle of the mounted but the only thing that really we could think of that’s not in Getty, which could have been on one of those missing pages. Certainly the missing one before the spear section, could be the play that’s in Morgan and Pisani Dossi, of the Masters who were an Iron Gate against the guy with a spear and a sword. Yeah, where Getty has something similar but it’s completely written differently and has different pictures.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and the Pisani Dossi does have a master of the Zogho Stretto, who is crossed from the reverso side, yes, which is a very cool thing that is clearly not present in the Getty, whether it ever was or not, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was.
Michael Chidester
If we want to imagine that the Getty was the actual repository of everything Fiore was teaching, then the stuff that’s in Pisani Dossi, which, for people who are a little bit less familiar, is the other manuscript that’s comparable in size to Getty, but has much shorter descriptions, so it has most of the same material, but Getty and Pisani Dossi have their unique aspects, their unique plays, and we could imagine that Getty might have had some of those in missing pages, depending on if there’s even more missing material than what’s obvious from the collation. But this is part of why I went to look at the manuscript was I wanted to actually study some of these details, like the rough and smooth sides, to see if I could learn anything about how the original manuscript was put together, and also to see if my facsimile was done right. Because sadly, the facsimile came out during the pandemic when the library was closed. So it was two years later that I finally got into the library.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I have that facsimile. How accurate is it?
Michael Chidester
It’s accurate. It’s close enough that when I actually got the manuscript, it was kind of anticlimactic, because I felt like I’d stared at this exact book for so long that it was like, okay, this is really cool, but also it looks exactly like the book I have. There are a couple details that are wrong that I might go back and do a second version of it.
Guy Windsor
I will buy it immediately, just in case there’s any doubt.
Michael Chidester
To make a preliminary announcement, I guess, for your podcast listeners, in the next months, we’re going to open a crowdfunding campaign to do the Paris and Morgan as facsimiles, and probably also do a small number of Gettys.
Guy Windsor
We are recording this 25th of November 2024. It’s not going to go out until probably, I would guess, March next year at the earliest. So, if it has anyone on my mailing list will know about it, because as soon as when you’re ready, you will send it to me, and I will put it to my mailing list. Okay, so where should I start scribbling on my beautiful facsimile?
Michael Chidester
Well, I learned a few things. The scans that we have of Getty are not complete pages, which you can tell because they don’t have any page edge in the picture. But what they did is they took the picture, the photograph of the page with the manuscript open, and just chopped off all four sides, but not always evenly. So I assumed that they just took a rectangle out of the middle of the picture. But they didn’t. They were more clever than that, and sometimes they tried to cut out damage, or cut out things. So there are places where the picture is not quite centred the way it should be on the page. First of all, there are not very many HEMA fencing treatises that are on parchment. And parchment, like I said, is different from paper. This is one of the few parchment ones. And parchment comes in a wide variety of qualities. And I had asked Brian Stokes, who was the only person I knew who’d seen the Getty to describe the thickness of the parchment to me, and he said it was sort of like a manila folder. But when I actually got the manuscript in front of me, I found it was much thinner than that. So it is a very fine parchment, and I used a fairly thick paper.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So the paint is pretty solid and it should be thinner.
Michael Chidester
And it’s also shinier than I expected. Parchment usually has a shiny side and a dull side, but really nice parchment, even the dull side will be a little bit shiny. So I wish I’d used a glossier paper, but at the time, I was trying to go with the more rough aspect of conventional parchment, like the sort of middle class parchment. And then there was a couple things like that I noticed. I mentioned the collation reconstruction that I did based on the based on where the rough and smooth side is showed me that there are some things that shouldn’t be attached together that I attached together. I was going off a catalogue entry that said what the collation was.
Guy Windsor
I have that catalogue.
Michael Chidester
Something else, I don’t know. I have a short list of wants. So what I would probably do is do one that had a brown leather cover like the one currently does, to distinguish it from the red one that I did originally.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, which is the one I have.
Michael Chidester
The other one is the gold and silver enamel leaf, whatever they used it in the book, the way we did it, it comes off a little bit choppy and blocky and like there are places where it’s where it’s not very clean. And that was based on looking at the scans. We did one that was that was perfect gold leaf cutouts, basically, and it didn’t look right. It looked too new. But that is actually what the manuscript looks like, the gold leaf is pristine. So we would use a different paper that could do a much more complete gold but also, I learned, you’re familiar with the with the Morgan manuscript, but your listeners might not be with the black silver swords, where Fiore decided that every the person who’s winning each play has their weapon metal coloured in with silver leaf, which has corroded black, more or less. But the Getty appears to have silver enamel, silver leaf that’s still shiny and silver. And I discovered those are both not true, that in both cases, the silver is sort of a muddled gray. And if you light it properly, then it stands out as bright silver, and if you light it wrong, it goes to completely black. So the Morgan scans have black swords, and they have these sort of orangey copper-looking crowns, and the Getty scans have bright gold crowns and bright silver weapons, but the Getty only has three or four silver weapons. And when you look at the actual books, everything is bright gold and everything is silver on the right lighting, and in the wrong lighting, it just looks ugly. So it’s all about the people who did the photography. It’s not about the manuscript itself.
Guy Windsor
So you’re going to be producing the Paris and the Morgan and an updated Getty. Okay, so I need to sell how many kidneys?
Michael Chidester
I don’t think you have three, but, yeah, I don’t expect people are going to want to get a second Getty, but people who did first time.
Guy Windsor
Dude, I’m getting a second Getty. I’m getting a second Getty. No question.
Michael Chidester
I appreciate it. And I haven’t decided about the Pisani Dossi, because all we have is Novati’s facsimile, which is not super nice, I don’t know.
Guy Windsor
What you could do is you could take and this would take a huge amount of time, and you’d probably have to find volunteers for it, but you could take the Pisani Dossi scan facsimile that we have, and you could adjust it to look much closer to Brian’s thing. So you’re not reproducing Brian’s photographs. You’re adjusting the facsimile to look like the photographs. And you can add the colour that should be there. I mean, it’s a massive amount of graphic design work, but oh my god, it would be good.
Michael Chidester
I’m not sure how to undo some of the photo artifacting that happens short of redrawing, but yeah, I was hoping that someday there would be scans of this, because at the time that Brian photographed it, there had been rumours that the Italian government Ministry of Culture was interested in also scanning it, and I guess since then, that’s fallen apart, or at least was moving glacially slowly.
Guy Windsor
Do you mean an Italian government project was not an absolute marvel of speed and efficiency? I’m astonished.
Michael Chidester
But they recognize it as a cultural artifact that belongs to them. And the Italian government is big into both elevating and protecting their cultural artifacts. There’s been a lot of news stories about their strange copyright laws they put up. But anyways, they want to have it, I think specifically for what you said, if they get hit by an asteroid in, uh, whatever that town they’re in is called, then they don’t want it to be gone, but I guess the family is not interested. Anyway, it’s not important. Maybe someday we’ll discover that there are available scans of it, but not anytime soon.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so how does that affect the projects you told me about? Oh, you’re doing the Paris and the Morgan, not the Pisani Dossi, okay.
Michael Chidester
I keep feeling torn about it, but maybe, maybe someday.
Guy Windsor
So, I mean, the Morgan is quite a little book.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, it’s 20 parchment sheets, but they’re not in folded sheets like the Getty and the Paris are. They’ve been cut out of a larger manuscript, so they have ragged edges, and they were bound together that way, and now they’ve been disbound as of a few years ago, so they’re in just a folder now for when they decide to put it back into covers or what to do with it. But yeah, so it’s missing quite a bit of content that we can tell just from gaps in the stuff that’s there. It also doesn’t have dagger and wrestling, if it ever did, but it’s also missing pages in the weapons that it does cover. So it’s quite incomplete. It’s very beautiful, and if it was complete, I think it would eclipse the Getty, but it is missing some of the most important parts of the book. So it’s more a useful supplement to the Getty for most people than a standalone work.
Guy Windsor
So how do you actually go about creating these facsimiles?
Michael Chidester
I’m not a professional graphic designer, but I’m no slouch, so I do most of the work. I take the scans that have been made by the library or museum, and I do most of the work of editing them down. You have to remove the edges, but also trying to keep the exact size of the original manuscript, which is important to me, even though it’s not a detail most people notice. I sort of generate page texture to fill in the little edge and cover up the tattered edge of the original scan. So I prep all of the scans myself and get them into a state to print. And there’s a small bindery in Wisconsin that I work with to do the actual creation of the books. And they do the printing. We work together to figure out the right materials, choosing leather and choosing the paper stock that we’re going to use. Ideally, it would be nice to use authentic materials. So we get cotton rag paper when we can, but parchment, even if it was financially viable, is just difficult to work with and hard to print on. So we can’t do parchment. It also involves the slaughter of many animals, which some of my buyers would not be excited about. But yeah, so we don’t do parchment, but we try to find paper that matches as closely as possible. But a whole lot of it, on my end, is doing the careful editing of the scans to get them as close as possible to what the original is going to look like. And then the bindery starts building things in the physical world that they send me for approval, and we go through a process of proof checking.
Guy Windsor
And you sell these by like Kickstarter campaigns, but do you actually also stock them and sell them?
Michael Chidester
So when we do this, it’s funded by pre orders. And usually I have a target in my head of how many pre orders I want and then also how many I need. And then once we have enough pre orders, I’ll usually order a small number of extras, and those last as long as they last. So mostly they sell out within a few years, usually. I’ve got two or three facsimiles that I still have copies of, but a lot of the facsimile, to finish what I was saying, is based on research that I and others have done, not just about the scans, but which is a big piece of it, but things like the collation, things like the current state of the manuscript.
Guy Windsor
You reproduce the collation as faithfully as possible, right?
Michael Chidester
Yeah, and the books are stitched, but they’re not hand stitched, so we do some compromises to make it not cost $1,000 which is what many facsimiles that are slightly more faithful to the original construction would cost.
Guy Windsor
I mean, I compare yours to the Extraordinary Edition’s facsimile of 1.33, the Royal Armouries’ manuscript. And handling the actual books, I can’t see any quality difference between them, which is astonishing, because the 1.33 cost me, I think three times what yours cost me. Something like that, and it was totally worth it. Can I just say it was totally worth it. I wrote a great, long blog post about how incredibly worth the money it was, because it basically it cost at the time about the same as an iPhone. And I made the comparison about what is still going to look good in 100 years’ time, and what will not annoy you with irritating beeps at just the wrong moment. So totally worth it, but that you are doing it at a knockdown price.
Michael Chidester
That the one that sort of opened the door for me, because I didn’t buy it when it first went on sale. I got it during like the 45 minutes when the Royal Armories had it for half price. So I only paid like $350 for it, and not £750, but still it was more than I expected to pay for a book. And I got it, and that was kind of what set me down this path over time. I was like, this is really cool. I really like having this. Why is it so expensive? For the Talhoffer I said, what’s the cheapest it could possibly be to do a book like this. And at the time, it was not a business proposition. I did the first, the Talhoffer one, was sort of a just me idly wondering, it’s like, Could I charge $100? Can I make it that cheap? And it ended up being $150. Was the minimum I could charge. And I made only, like, $5 per book off that first run, because it was designed to not make money. It was just, how many people’s hands can I put this in, which was still the goal today. And I was, like, I could maybe squeeze by at $125 but I’ll charge $150 to make sure I have a cushion. And that was my first project.
Guy Windsor
Teah, I remember just being absolutely flabbergasted by how cheap it was. So I’m glad for your sake that you put your prices up a little bit, because you deserve to be making more money for it.
Michael Chidester
It has gone up in cost since then, because soon after, while the Talhoffer was still being made, I lost my pharma job, and I started doing HEMA Bookshelf full time to see if I could turn it into a viable business, which meant I could actually earn money. It is viable. It’s not going as well as I hoped when everybody had pandemic money to spread around. I might have got false expectations about how many books I could sell to people, but it’s still going, and I’m still hopeful that it’s not going to crash and burn.
Guy Windsor
Because you also do sort of academic books based on these treatises.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, especially for the first few facsimiles, we did these commentary volumes where the idea was to try and get some of the more recent research into historical fencing written down in in a proper academic citable, I mean, they’re not, they’re not from a main publisher. So depending on your standards, they might not be citable. They’re at least good quality research that’s properly annotated and properly done everything, as best we can, to academic standards. And the Talhoffer one was mostly based on I talked to people who’d published on Talhoffer and put together a compilation of some original work and some previously released things that they did some small updates to. And then for the Lecküchner, we got more ambitious, and it was all original research that everyone did during their pandemic downtime. And it turned out beautiful. And we did one for the Codex Wallerstein or Bauman fight book, which was a bit shorter, but covered all the bases I wanted to cover. And these always have the transcription. They mostly have a translation, and then they get into other research after that, to try and give a better understanding of the context and so on. And then, once the facsimiles have started selling out, I put out reproductions of the scans, like your Getty one. For the other ones we’ve done, I haven’t done the Getty to avoid muscling on your turf. But the other ones, we started doing these reproduction books. So you can have a two volume set that you can have the pictures open in one book and then the text in the other book. Which is how I like to study things, and that’s a solution to these facsimiles that constantly selling out when people are still wanting to get them.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, because the academic books, are they printed on demand? They’re certainly not stitched with fancy bindings, and they’re like, regular books.
Michael Chidester
They’re done through either print on demand or short run printing services, depending on the book and what I need from them. So we can, we can keep making those indefinitely. We don’t sell out of those. And also a lot of work goes into those. Those are more work than the facsimiles are usually, I would hate them to be a temporary flash in the pan and then become useless.
Guy Windsor
So, what is the latest book?
Michael Chidester
The one that I’m in the process of releasing, that is my pandemic project for my Patreon was a new translation of a Liechtenauer text. So perhaps less exciting to you, but it’s one of the glosses of Liechtenauer’s poem, which is called the Zettel. And this is the only one that’s by a named master Sigmund Einring, or Sigmund ein Ringeck. The thing about his text is that, unlike a lot of fencing treatises, there’s no complete ideal copy of it. We don’t have the Getty manuscript. We don’t have the Danzig manuscript for it. All we have is bits and pieces in fragmentary accounts in different manuscripts. There’s one manuscript in Dresden that everybody looks to you for Ringeck that’s missing a lot of important content. And so I went through and on Wiktenauer years ago, I tried to put the puzzle together of all the different transcriptions and how they fit together. And for this book, I translated all of them separately. It’s a really important text, but I think people have not had the best view of it because an inferior manuscript is the only one that’s been translated. So I tried to put all the pieces together into a compilation with transcriptions by Dierk Hagedorn. And then I also did a smooth, streamlined translation that’s supposed to actually be in readable, normal English with the phrasing streamlined and non-gendered pronouns, and turning it into a useful, readable text with illustrations from some of the illustrated Liechtenauer texts, because Ringeck refers to illustrations frequently, but none of the manuscripts have all those pictures. So I tried to figure out what the pictures would have been for the ones that are missing, including the Clooney manuscript, which is a gorgeous Liechtenauer manuscript that has no text, but it has illustrations of most of Liechtenauer’s techniques, and then a blank spot where text might have been had they finished. So yes, the book is called Pieces of Ringeck, which is sort of a pun, because “piece” is the word that Germans use to describe techniques. And it’s also very much about taking all these puzzle pieces and trying to assemble a single useful fencing treatise out of them for people to work from. And hopefully, refresh their Liechtenauer study a little bit.
Guy Windsor
Wow. So it’s basically the new must have, anyone interested in Liechtenauer / German Longsword stuff, they have to have this book.
Michael Chidester
I hope so. It’s 500 pages long, and we’re doing a full colour print using a very nice UK printer that I recently started working with. And the book is hefty.
Guy Windsor
When do you expect it to come out?
Michael Chidester
Well, by the time this airs, it should already be out. I’m looking at a December release.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, definitely. Michael, where can people find it?
Michael Chidester
You can buy it from directly from my website, which is hemabookshelf.com,
Guy Windsor
That’s where you should get it from, people, you probably can get it elsewhere, but you should definitely buy it direct, if you can.
Michael Chidester
I’m not sure if it’ll go on Amazon, but we will have some probably third party distributors. I’m trying to find somebody in Europe who can sell without having to pay customs. But, I’ll definitely copies. Dierk might have copies, but it’s tricky shipping books to European mainland from UK or USA.
Guy Windsor
It is, yes, I’m, yeah, I mean, the only place I can think of that might stock it in the UK, but it would only be any use for UK orders would be the Knight’s Shop. I can think of several places in Europe, if you can get the books to Europe.
Michael Chidester
There’s the rub, right? I don’t have a mule who can just carry them across the borders.
Guy Windsor
Dude, I go into Europe all the time. I go to Helsinki at least twice a year, and I go to Germany, usually at least once, or maybe twice a year. And there are options. I don’t have to have heavy bags in both directions.
Michael Chidester
We’ll have a chat about that.
Guy Windsor
Maybe chat about that where future tax avoidance investigations can’t actually just present the evidence in court.
Michael Chidester
This hypothetical conversation will not turn into any action. Don’t worry. The other book that I’m currently working on. We talked about my Fiore translation is a revised version of the Fiore compilation book that I did 10 years ago now almost, with all new translations, which is what my Getty translation is now in aid of, is Morgan and Getty and Pisani Dossi.
Guy Windsor
This is a superb book, by the way, people listening, because it is basically a concordance of the various Fiore manuscripts. So that a technique in the dagger section, for example, which appears in one place in the Getty in a different place in the Pisani Dossi, and it was definitely missing from the Morgan, but it might be there in the Paris. So you get all the versions of the technique that exist and the translations all side by side on the page, so you can actually see as many different views as possible of the same technique. It is a fundamentally useful book. |Just saying.
Michael Chidester
That one suffered heavily from the four different translator biases problem when I did it, so this will be fixing that. Well, I’ve re-transcribed all the manuscripts, so it’ll have the Italian text as well, if I can fit it all on the page. That’s how I prefer to study Fiore. I am not a manuscript purist. I try to look at them all simultaneously. And this book maybe evangelizes that view a little bit. I don’t have a problem with people deep diving into one. But I think if you’ve never looked at all four, then you’re missing out. So this is a compliment to everybody, including you, who are doing the deep dive into one manuscript. This will be the high-level view of all of them at once.
Guy Windsor
Fantastic. Yeah, super useful. And I do look at all the manuscripts, but obviously the Getty is the one that everyone spends the most time on, because it’s the most useful. Okay, so you do tend to act on the ideas that you get, clearly, given the extraordinary number of facsimiles and academic works and Wiktenauer itself, etc., so what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Michael Chidester
The history of HEMA. Maybe it’s not important to everybody who’s a historical fencer, but I feel like we’re losing our touch as a community, as many adjacent communities, to the roots of where this all came from. And people who’ve, especially people who’ve started fencing since covid started, don’t have a grasp of what came before. They started out isolated with just their own club. They weren’t meeting people, they weren’t hearing about things. And at the same time, there’s no longer as many spaces where people are interacting across countries, but trying to capture the stories of all the pioneers, both of the people like you and I, who’ve been doing this for 20, 30 years, and also people who were the first one in their country, the first person in their region, like, how did we start HEMA from nothing? And I want to try and capture some of those stories, because some of those people are already dead, and the rest of us aren’t going to last forever.
Guy Windsor
I have actually tried to interview several people, who predate me in this area, Steven Muhlberger being an obvious example. He’s been on the show, because I want to hear about what it was like before even I started doing it. And the first spark that created the thing happened in September 1992 I think. And there are people doing similar things in the 80s, I mean, I have a copy of Life magazine, which has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s grandson putting on actual historical 15th century armour that, of course, he has in his house because grandpa was extremely rich thanks to Sherlock Holmes. Literally strapping on armour and fighting his friends in armour in the 1950s. I have that copy of Life magazine right there on the bookshelf. So people had the idea of, oh, wouldn’t it be cool to put on armour and pretend we were knights and bash each other back then. And I’m not sure who the first person was who thought, let’s actually reconstruct historical martial arts from the sources, but there were people doing it at the end of the 19th century.
Michael Chidester
That’s an interesting thing, right? Is that throughout history, I think even going back to the 17th century, there were people who were looking at medieval stuff and reenacting it as carnival games and so on. And maybe sometimes seriously, we talk about Paulus Hector Mair, and we talk about Joachim Meyer complaining about how the art is being lost. And maybe they were just complaining, because clearly they were finding an audience for their books, even still, but looking back to the previous century at those teachings, so I think, the human fascination with earlier fighting systems and earlier weapons is continuous throughout at least the last many centuries. But also we can look at what we’re doing now and say there were people in the 1960s who started doing things, and their students are still doing things now. And so there’s a continuous chain of influence that, for me, starts in maybe the mid 60s and goes to the mid 20s now. That’s 60 years of people picking up swords, right? There were people at the Royal Armouries looking at Talhoffer in the 60s. There was Martin Wierschin’s book about Liechtenauer. There was the SCA was being formed and fighting an armour in California. There were these seeds of what we do now that were planted and have continued to grow. And I would like to capture that story somehow, and your podcast and Chris Van Slambrook has started a podcast a couple years ago that kind of fizzled, doing the same thing of interviewing people and trying to get the history. And I’ve thought about doing my own podcast and trying to get more people to tell these stories.
Guy Windsor
Would you produce a book out of it?
Michael Chidester
I think it needs to become a book, the podcast is the first step to get everyone talking, because these people aren’t writers a lot of the time.
Guy Windsor
No, you’d have to write it. Yeah, you would have to write it. So you might as well make the interviews public. Why not?
Michael Chidester
Getting the information is the missing piece, and that we need to chip away, until we get all these people to give us their stories, and then we can actually say, not just a vague idea, well, in the 90s, there were people who picked up swords, and I don’t know John Clemens said he was doing in the 80s, and I know Matt Gallus was, but like concrete details, who were the first clubs? What happened to them? When did they go away? Are they still there? Who did they teach and what did those people do and get this sort of social network that built HEMA, built historical fencing, and actually try to capture it in a comprehensive way, which I’m not a social historian, but no social historian that I know of is working on this, so maybe it falls to me.
Guy Windsor
So why haven’t you acted on it yet, Michael, what have you been up to?
Michael Chidester
Time. So between Wiktenauer and HEMA Bookshelf, I have negative time in the day, but I’m hoping at least podcasts are not as time consuming as writing is, or so I understand it’s an hour or two of talking and then an hour or two of editing.
Guy Windsor
dude, the transcription of this, of this episode of this show, which is probably going to be about an hour and a half by the time we’re done, it’s going to be probably somewhere around 9000 words. Have you ever written 9000 words in an hour and a half?
Michael Chidester
I have not. Not good words.
Guy Windsor
On a good day when I’m really steaming ahead on in a on the first draft of a new book, I might do 1500 or maybe 2000 words in an hour. So this is four times faster. For a lot of people, people who aren’t writers, getting them to talk about what they did is easy. Getting them to write it is often super hard. So my listeners can expect a podcast from you going into the history of historical martial arts as a sort of movement sometime in the near future. Okay, here’s what would really help with that. If everyone listening went out and bought a shitload of your books so you had a ton of money, so you weren’t under so much pressure to produce the next book in the HEMA Bookshelf and so that would make the project more likely yes. Say yes. There we go.
Michael Chidester
I also need to learn how podcasting works, but I know you and other people could probably coach me in that a bit when the time comes.
Guy Windsor
I figured it out from first principles. And anyone who’s listened to the show from the very beginning, will notice the point at which I hired a sound engineer to give me a two hour tutorial over the internet on how to actually get the sound of sound right. It cost me maybe 150 quid or something, but it was like the best money I ever spent on the show, honestly, because it just transformed the quality.
Michael Chidester
But, yeah, I think this really will happen at some point, maybe soon, because I have questions that I want to know about too. Who was the first person in HEMA who made a feder?
Guy Windsor
Take them out and break their legs.
Michael Chidester
Peter McKenie was making them in 2004 I think, but he wasn’t the first one. There’s a lot of stories that we take for granted that I would like to not take for granted anymore.
Guy Windsor
That’s the thing you have that sort of historian’s curiosity as to what actually happened and how can you prove it.
Michael Chidester
Yeah. And I think getting people to ramble for a while is the first step.
Guy Windsor
Which is what my next question often does. So last time, when I asked you, someone gave you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide, you said you would be hiring professional translators, not only into English, but also, for example, translating maybe Fiore into Chinese, or Fiore into Arabic, or Fiore into Spanish or whatever else, and also scholarships so that people could afford to go to events and interact with their peers who may not otherwise afford to do it. Is that how you would still spend the money?
Michael Chidester
I think those are both good ideas that I don’t remember talking about, but I don’t disagree with.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I checked the transcript.
Michael Chidester
I assumed so. I think to me, maybe I’d give it a slightly different spin. HEMA, or, you know, whatever you want to call it. HMA, historical fencing, WMA, we have lots of terms. It happens in person, like we connect on the internet. For me, at least, the internet connections is how I stay motivated to keep doing my thing is keeping in touch with people who I don’t see in person often enough, but you have to go and do it, and you have to meet people. And I think if you want to really appreciate what’s happening in historical fencing, you have to travel to many places and meet lots of people who are doing things different from you. So I think facilitating the in person aspect of historical fencing is the most important thing we could be doing. Research is important, and I would love to be able to offer grants to researchers to work on things that I think are interesting, but in terms of not just maybe offering scholarships, but giving money to create more events and different kinds of events, events that have international draw, events that focus on aspects of the arts that we study that aren’t just specifically tournaments. We have events like Hemac Dijon with WMAW, we have some of these workshop centric events, but I think there’s plenty of room in the world to create more events that are specifically topic focused and are interesting enough to get people to show up, especially if we had money to subsidize them to a degree. So I think if I had money to just throw around, it would be very much not just me organizing, but finding people who want to create the sort of niche events and sponsoring those events.
Guy Windsor
Here’s an event I have never seen, but I would like to see. One focused on reconstructing the way of moving that we see in the sources. Because, you know, someone doing Capoferro moves very differently to someone doing Fabris, moves very differently to somebody doing Fiore, moves differently to somebody doing Liechtenauer, although that’s closer. How do we come up with our idea of how we should move in this system? How do we test those ideas? So being less concerned about pulling off techniques particularly, or it’s often like, here are some flashy techniques from the treatise that I like, and that gets people into the class, but a whole weekend where people are focused on, how do we move in this system, and why do we think that’s how we move in this system?
Michael Chidester
That’s a really interesting question. I know there’s an event in Maryland, I believe, called Dance Fight that’s very much about studying movement. And in that case, it’s about, I think, comparing or using dance to try and teach people to move in new ways for their historical fencing. But as far as looking at historical influence and trying to understand the way a person might have moved 500 years ago that’s different from us, I agree that’s something that hasn’t got a lot of attention. The event that I was brainstorming with Jake Norwood before and as Covid started, which derailed it all, was an event that was looking at Liechtenauer studies, but early Liechtenauer and maybe a little bit of Fiore, but primarily about bringing in teachers who are antithetical to each other, and getting them to teach the same people, and also to focus more on judicial duelling reconstruction. Because I’ve done a lot of study of 16th or 15th century duelling practices that don’t get a lot of attention, and trying to understand how the stuff that we have might have been influenced by that. There’s a lot of aspects of even the really commonly studied historical fencing systems that I think don’t get attention, not because there’s not interest, but because there’s not a place to do them. And so that event was going to be alternating between that and Longpoint was putting together a smaller event to get people actually talking and studying and thinking about historical context and not just practical application, which is important, but is also the thing that’s most thoroughly covered by the community today.
Guy Windsor
Because that’s what most people are interested in, because it’s the shiny bit.
Michael Chidester
Doesn’t need as much hand holding to get people excited about.
Guy Windsor
Oh, incidentally, do you have any plans to produce a facsimile of Vadi?
Michael Chidester
I do, but they’re not clear plans, so I don’t know. I assume you’ve heard through the grapevine, like I have, that there is more than one Vadi manuscript.
Guy Windsor
I’ve never seen any others.
Michael Chidester
The Vatican archives says they have one, but there’s not information forthcoming about it, and there’s a possibility that there’s another one in Rome, but might just be a catalogue phantom for the one in the National Library, but we’re not sure yet. But the one that’s in the 100 year old catalogue description from the Vatican is both larger and longer than the Vadi manuscript that we have. So if I was going to do Vadi, I’ve been sort of hoping that we’d get better information about that, and that could be one to reproduce it as the years pass and we don’t get closer to getting it, I might just give up and look at the one in the National Library.
Guy Windsor
I have a thought for you. Quite a few people study Vadi, including me. And if you produced a Vadi facsimile, it’s a lot smaller than, for example, Fiore. It’s shorter, and it’s literally physically smaller. It’s more of an octavo than a folio. So we’d all buy it. And then three years, five years later, you find this amazing new Vadi and so you do a facsimile of that, we’ll all buy that one too.
Michael Chidester
That’s a good point.
Guy Windsor
If you bring them out on the same day, we have, most people can’t afford both. They’d choose one or the other and probably choose the bigger one. But bring out one now bring another one even in a year, most people will have saved up the shekels.
Michael Chidester
Well, I’m going to do a Fiore next, and then probably something German, so as not to flood the market too much. I alternate, because some people can only get one a year, and I want to make sure that they’re not having to choose between two and dilute the market that way. I don’t know. I tell myself this is important, but the so maybe 2026 is the year for Vadi. We’ll see.
Guy Windsor
Okay, yeah, I will circle back on that.
Michael Chidester
I will have to re-scan before I could do anything with it, because the scans we have are not good enough.
Guy Windsor
They have new scans.
Michael Chidester
They do? The ones online are not very good, the ones on their website.
Guy Windsor
I will send you a link. They have better scans than they did. Making a big note, “send Vadi to Michael.”
Michael Chidester
But yeah, I like Vadi. Vadi is neat and Vadi is one of the areas of early historical fencing that seems to be growing these days quite a bit. It’s interesting that the extent to which it exploded in the last maybe five or six years.
Guy Windsor
I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with me bringing out my new edition in 2018 I think that might have had something to do with it. I hope so, because people are buying it, not in huge numbers, but they are definitely buying it.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, it’s not a huge group, but they’re dedicated, as far as I can tell. The people who are into Vadi are really into Vadi.
Guy Windsor
yeah, ah, so and so. Obviously they will go and buy the facsimile, just to talk.
Michael Chidester
Besides, it’s got shiny parts, I like manuscripts with shiny parts, it’s illuminated. There aren’t that many illuminated fencing treatises. There’s maybe six, maybe seven.
Guy Windsor
At least four of them are Fiore.
Michael Chidester
There’s that French one from the 1580s Oh, yeah, and I guess Paulus Hector Mair counts, and that’s probably about it. So yeah, it’s a small group. And doing all of them is not a bad idea because they’re pretty.
Guy Windsor
Fair, and I’m sure people will buy them just because they’re pretty. Okay, so when do we expect the Paris and the Morgan?
Michael Chidester
At this point, because projects keep piling up, I’m thinking I’ll probably launch the project in January. So by the time, maybe December, by the time this airs, it will certainly have finished fundraising, but it will certainly still be available to buy.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. All right, and we will put links in the show notes so that people can go find those glorious books, or they could just come to my house where they will probably find copies.
Michael Chidester
And mine, yeah.
Guy Windsor
Excellent, thank you so much for joining me today, Michael, it’s been lovely to see you again.
Michael Chidester
Yeah, good to talk to you, Guy.
