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The Sword Guy Podcast

Listen in as Guy interviews a wide variety of interesting swordspeople and historians from around the world. Learn more about the practical, the tactical, the theoretical and the just plain awesome from a diverse group of voices.

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Podcast Tag: medieval

elizabeth chadwick

Episode 180

Writing Historical Novels: the Facts and the Fiction, with Elizabeth Chadwick

Elizabeth Chadwick is an award winning best-selling writer of historical fiction. She has been writing since she was a teenager, but it took many years and many books before she was finally published. She has had great success since, so it’s a good example for aspiring writers out there to keep going! In our conversation we talk about some of the historical figures which feature in Elizabeth’s novels, including William Marshal, Eleanor of Aquitaine, […]

Episode 179

Horse Armour at the Royal Armouries, with Eleanor Wilkinson-Keys

Today’s episode is with Eleanor Wilkinson-Keys, who is Assistant Curator of Arms and Armour at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. She has an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds, and works with the European armour and edge weapons collections, which makes us all extremely jealous, and the Asian and African collection which also makes us extremely jealous. She works there with Natasha Bennett, who you may recall from Episode 82. […]

Episode 79

Armour of the English Knight, with Tobias Capwell

Dr Tobias Capwell has a lifelong love of arms and armour, since being taken to the Met Museum in New York as a small child. He has made this passion into a career and is now the curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London. We talk about how he got the job as a museum curator, including offering his services to the Met Museum at the tender age of twelve. […]

Episode 58

Shakespeare and Silver with Ben Crystal

Ben Crystal is an actor, author, producer, and explorer of original practices in Shakespeare rehearsal and production. In this episode we talk about Ben’s work in exploring how actors would have rehearsed, staged, and performed Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, and how the original rhymes and pronunciation would have sounded. It makes for a completely different experience to what we think of as “Shakespearean” in modern times. Even if you aren’t into Shakespeare […]

Episode 53

Mines and Mimeographs, with Steven Muhlberger

Professor Steven Muhlberger is an absolute legend in the historical martial arts community and is a 50 year veteran of the SCA. In this episode we talk about the very early days of the SCA, and how newsletters were vital in spreading the word. His books are foundationally important for anyone who is studying medieval martial arts, and they include Deeds of Arms, Jousts and Tournaments, Formal Combat in the Fourteenth Century, Royal Jousts, […]

Episode 49

History is my playground, with Mike Loades

Best known as a television presenter and for his appearances as a historical weapons specialist and military historian in over one hundred tv documentaries, Mike also works as a tv director, a writer and as a consultant and film-maker for the video games industry. If you’ve been swinging swords, certainly in Britain at least, at any point in the last 30 years, you’ll certainly have heard of him. He has had three major books published, […]

Episode 45

Fire and Cauldrons, with Ruth Goodman

Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian working with museums, theatre, television and educational establishments. She has presented and consulted on several highly successful television series for the BBC. She has also written several excellent books we’ll be talking about today, including The Domestic Revolution, How to be a Tudor and How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England. In this episode, Ruth and I talk about some of the lesser known, but nonetheless […]

Episode 37

Medieval swords and research, with James Hester

James Hester has been involved with HEMA since the age of 15, when he began performing fight shows throughout New England. He then set his course as an academic and educator, working in museums before completing an MA in Medieval Studies in the UK. He then joined the Royal Armouries Museum, rising over five years to become Curator of Tower Collections at the Tower of London. In 2015 he was awarded the Arms & […]

Episode 33

How to Make Swords, with Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson is Manager of Arms and Armor, a sword lover’s dream job, as they make a wide variety of items from the Medieval and Renaissance periods to faithfully recreate the look, feel, and function of historic weapons. In this episode, we talk about recreating medieval swords as faithfully as possible, modern fashions in sword design, and the intricacies of sword manufacture. If you are interested in anything to do with swords and how […]

Episode 28

Art and Fencing, with Nora Cannaday

Nora Cannaday is an artist and a fencer from sunny Southern California. She works primarily in watercolours and in illumination, though we cover a lot more in this episode, including calligraphy, translations, making a living from your art and whether simply putting in the hours of practice is enough to get good. You can see an example of her work here with the logo she produced for the Spada Press: In this episode we […]

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