Hans Wilhelm Schoeffer

[Jeremy S.]

Holy crap! This manuscript is huge! The number of plates and techniques is fantastic!
I wish my translation skills were a whole lot better!

[Francesco Lanza]

Ah! That table is straight out of Fabris. It's always caught my fancy too.



It's from the second part of his treatise, which is quite noticeable in rapier fencing since it teaches quite a lot of plays which are supposed to be performed without stopping or giving pause or consideration to the adversary, just walking your way towards him, often in circular steps. This is pretty advanced stuff, especially if you look at the rapier from a Classical fencing background in which you defend and attack starting from a pretty static position (a true guard!), but looks quite normal if you are into older stuff -or in the Neapolitan school. Let's not forget that Fabris wrote att the beginning 17th century, and that he was already old. I still can't really fathom how the shift to the linear rapier developed itself: I get the whys and the whens, but how they matured this new set of skills to such a level in less than a couple of generations is still awesome.

[Michael Chidester]

Palas Armata is only 95 pages long, so I'd be skeptical about how much of Schoeffer/Fabris are really "included".

[Francesco Lanza]

It has absolutely no consequence upon the topic in question, but I just realized that Fabris and Meyer were almost the same age, with Fabris at most 10 years younger. That leads to an interesting question: had Meyer lived to the beginning of 17th century like his Paduan colleague, had he written a treatise in his old age what kind of style would it have detailed?

Also, when Fabris was Meyer's (last reported) age, adult but still youthful, what kind of fencing would he have practiced? There will never be an answer, but this sort of stuff is fascinating.