Musashi for the Rapier Combatant: Adventures in Cross-Training

Greetings, Musashi for the rapier combatant? What is he on about? These are the first two questions that I would expect to be asked with regard to this particular topic. The idea of this blog is to get people thinking about other resources that they might find useful in their study of swordplay. I have actually already written an article entitled "Musashi for the Rapier Combatant" and I was tempted to simply re-print that article here. Instead I have decided to go through the approach that led me to such a conclusion and the article that resulted. "Let the Gaze Be Broad" is one of the most used sayings found in Musashi's book Go Rin No Sho, or The Book of Five Rings. From Musashi's point of view it is about being aware of the opponent and also aware of your surroundings when facing an opponent. For the purposes of this particular discussion it is also about being aware of the resources available to you in your research. People tend to approach the research of fencing and swordplay in general from one of two points of view, a narrow view or a broad view of things. Each one of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages. They are also useful for different things depending on the desired outcome of the particular research. For the narrow view, people get caught up with the importance of a culturally-centric, weapon-centric, or even "school"-centric approach in their approach. The advantage of this is that they are totally focused on their material and will go into all of the finer details in their particular approach. One problem is that if they are hampered by the source material, being a translation issue or an availability, then their research will stop. Every researcher has been here, "I could really do with studying "X" but it is a) written in a language I don't speak or b) simply is not available." Another problem is that they do not experience swordplay from a broad point of view and thus miss the overall picture. For the researcher with a broad point of view, this is less of an issue. The broad point of view looks at all of the source material that is available and thus has much more to look at. The wealth of information can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage being the quantity of material available and the disadvantage being that there is so much of it that research on a particular topic can last forever and never really finish. The advantage of the broad point of view is that this researcher is able to compare and contrast, and get a view of topics from an overall perspective rather than a focused one. The researcher with the broad point of view is able to use resources from different places in order to build his research and this can lead to using some resources of unexpected usefulness. There are resources out there which on the surface look like that they will be of no use to the researcher of swordplay. One of the obvious examples for the researcher of rapier combat is the usefulness of sport fencing materials. The movements expressed in these texts can be quite useful, but the real value is in the drills and concepts which are most useful. From an even broader point of view, you need to look at ....

The rest of this article can be found in Un-Blogged: A Fencer's Ramblings by Henry Walker, which is available in paperback from:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Blogged-Ramblings-Henry-Leigh-Walker/dp/098764470X
Booktopia: https://www.booktopia.com.au/un-blogged-henry-leigh-walker/book/9780987644701.html
Among other places...

It is also available in electronic format (pdf) from: https://buy.stripe.com/fZecP419c7CB9VKeUV

... or direct from the author.