CANCELLED! CAMPS Lab: ‘The seven parts of sword-fighting. A linguistic analysis of Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33’

CANCELLED!

CAMPS Lab: ‘The seven parts of sword-fighting. A linguistic analysis of Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33’

Jacopo Bisagni (Ancient Classics, University of Galway) will be presenting on ‘The seven parts of sword-fighting. A linguistic analysis of Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33’.  

‘Unlike most medieval works on the art of combat, which were typically composed in vernacular languages (especially German and Italian), the fencing manual for sword and buckler preserved in the manuscript Leeds, Royal Armouries, I.33 was instead written in Latin. However, this is a kind of Latin very distant from the Classical ‘norm’: indeed, the language of I.33 brings us closer to the dimensions of Late Medieval orality and education, opening a fascinating window onto the instructional language of a fourteenth-century ecclesiastical fencing master. But what does the Latin of I.33 reveal about its author, its date, and its milieu? And how can we come to a deeper and more objective understanding of its technical vocabulary? After introducing I.33 in the wider context of Late Medieval combat manuals, I will try and show how possible answers to these and other questions may be found by focussing especially on the semantic study of this text’s lexicon, as well as on the analysis of its phraseology and bilingualism.’

After the talk, Jacopo Bisagni and Andrew Ó Donnghaile will provide a practical demonstration of some of the sword-fighting techniques described in the first six folios of I.33.