Donovan Shinnock

Challenges Entered: Down the Rabbit Hole

Project: A collection of fencing research - from period lists to London Masters of Defense

Some of the more common discussions (and complaints) that come up time and again among fencers is that of lists. The sizes of them. What we use to designate them. How we handle people hitting the boundary or crossing over it. How our answers to all of these things impact how we fence, and if it causes us to move away from a more historical style of combat.

One of those topics got lodged in my head, and that started this entire dive down the rabbit hole.

The rapier manual of Salvatore Fabris contains an extensive section on "proceeding with resolution," which is to say, walking towards your opponent in a steady, unstopping motion and striking them as you enter optimal distance. I had been thinking, "how practical is this, when my opponent can back up to the ropes and a marshal just calls a hold and repositions us to the center of the list"?

Then I moved on to "how was backing up actually viewed in this period, anyway" which brought me to "well how big were these stages that prize fights in London were being fought on" and while answering those, I dug up a fair bit of other interesting information about the London Masters of Defense. I dropped a self-imposed boundary for my research just outside the interesting dirt about the London Masters of Defense that I learned over the course of my original topic. I have another blog post that I want to write about prize-fights specifically, but I had to draw the line somewhere for the purposes of this project, or it would still be going on months from now.

Below are the links to four blog posts that contain the results of this random decision to wander down this oddball topic! I hope they're as entertaining to read as they were to research and write.

https://donovanshinnock.blogspot.com/2021/02/list-boundaries-and-historic-prize.html

https://donovanshinnock.blogspot.com/2021/03/more-cool-history-stuff-scaffolds-and.html

https://donovanshinnock.blogspot.com/2021/05/yet-more-playhouses.html

https://donovanshinnock.blogspot.com/2021/05/wrapping-london-masters-of-defense.html