Come out and honor love that lasts forever

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I’m going to take a little break from shelf marks for National Coming Out Day!

Last year I wrote about the joy of embracing what I love most about sword research and sharing that with people, instead of trying to become what people might want me to be. A year later, I’ve taught my text interpretation class at, I forget, at least six events? And I’ve learned a lot about teaching in the process (or maybe a little; I still have plenty left to learn). And, honestly, it’s still great! I’m so glad that someone gave me an opportunity to be my truer self, and that I saw the opportunity and seized it.

I haven’t had as much time for deep thinking this year, so instead I want to share with you some things I learned about at this year’s Kalamazoo conference that just about made me cry tears of queer joy mid-lecture.

The first the story of two crusader knights, Sir John Clanvowe and Sir William Neville, who died 4 days apart while on campaign in the Holy Land, and were buried together and memorialized in a stone carving in which they have matching shields combining their heraldry. I need to read more about them– and about Clanvowe’s debate poetry– but for now, I just love this carving celebrating two men who couldn’t live without each other.

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The second is the story of two women, Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham, who died thirty years apart but had a close relationship in life and were buried together. They would have been close in age; the portraits’ different heights reflect their ages at death. Oxenbridge, who died second, never married, which is unusual and striking in an era when women had limited legal rights or options for financial support outside of marriage, and marriage was not considered a primarily romantic arrangement. Marrying for political reasons or to secure long-term support– and subsequently having children– could and did happen regardless of either party’s sexual or romantic inclinations. So, especially for a woman, being unmarried into their twenties and, in Oxenbridge’s case, into her fifties, probably reflects a deliberate and brave choice. The talk I heard at Kalamazoo observed that Oxenbridge’s family would have traveled for multiple days to bury her in the Etchingham family tomb rather than their own.

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And after those serious and lovely things, here’s a silly thing I made. It still needs work, but I think it’s a good concept. It’s based on the National Coming Out Day logo by Keith Haring, but with a Fiore guy busting out of the closet.

Shelfmarks part 1: Reading

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Dear readers, it has been a heck of a year, during which I apparently have not written to you at all. The short story is, I got a new job and it takes more of my time and attention. But the important part is, you’re still here reading this! Thank you for your patience.

Someone asked me for advice on how to follow a manuscript page citation to its source, and that seemed like information everyone could use.

Buckle up, this turned out way longer than I expected!

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Suppose you have a manuscript page you want to find. Perhaps someone texted you a picture like this (thanks, Chris!) and you want to know more about the artwork. So you ask your friendly armor lady expert, who says “Oh, of course, that’s BnF MS Francais 599, 27v. That one has tons of cool pictures, you should check it out!”

…Okay, maybe that’s a strained example, but I don’t know what kind of credit information is actually on the book. I would look for some fine print towards the bottom of the back cover, or on the copyright page (back of the title page) or look for image credit information on the last printed pages of the book, which might say something like “Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Français 599, 27v”.

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Still strained? Okay, if you aren’t a person whose friends text you manuscript citations in the middle of the night, and you don’t find yourself reading copyright pages or following footnotes, you might some day see a cool picture on the internet, and want to know more. Maybe you download a copy, or maybe you end up at its Wikimedia Commons file page, and you notice the file name is Harley 3469, f.26.

I swear, these examples were going to seem less contrived, but my casual research process keeps stalling on websites that are down, super slow, or not working as expected. Google’s Reverse Image Search sees everything I upload as pale grey rectangles today, so… here we are. But seriously, Wikimedia Commons is a great place to search for historical images including manuscript pages.

Okay, so after much fussing, we have some shelfmarks.

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But what is a shelfmark?

Continue reading “Shelfmarks part 1: Reading” →

Seeing Florius in a new light

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Photo by Michael Chidester

In 2022, I had the good fortune to see, handle, and photograph the Florius manuscript (the ca 1420 Latin translation of Fiore dei Liberi’s short verses about one-on-one combat techniques) in the reading room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

That alone is exciting, but while reviewing the rules and requirements of the reading room, I learned that visitors may request to use an ultraviolet Wood lamp during their appointment. I didn’t know a lot about ultraviolet viewing of manuscripts, but I had read that it can help recover writing that has been erased or damaged.

Florius certainly has plenty of damaged text, most noticeably on the very first page. I tried to examine it in as many different lighting conditions as I could politely create, hoping to catch any new details that might be there. Here are photos I took of the lion verse seen with reflected light (lit from in front), transmitted (lit from behind), transmitted but with different camera settings or something, and ultraviolet. The right edge fades into blur because the binding doesn’t open very wide here.

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Transmitted light
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Transmitted light (different settings)
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Reflected light (at an angle)
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Ultraviolet light

It’s still really hard to read, but the ultraviolet light definitely adds detail that the other photos don’t have.

But, as exciting as it is to get some insight into the badly damaged first page and its enigmatic verses, what I was really excited to hit with the blacklight was annotations.

I have been fascinated by the readers’ notes between and beside the lines of text in the Florius manuscript for as long as I’ve been aware of them. The manuscript itself represents the rare phenomenon of a contemporary (within a few decades) translation of a fencing treatise. But these notes, in different media and hands which indicate they’re left by different readers, give me a tiny glimpse at earlier people who, just like me, sought to understand and learn from this text. (If you’re interested in this, watch for my forthcoming article in Acta Periodica Duellatorum!)

Despite that value, some of the notes (in pencil) have been erased. I can see how to some people, these notes might be unwanted or even seem like vandalism, but I don’t have to like it.

Enter the Wood lamp!

Continue reading “Seeing Florius in a new light” →

Latin Lew workshop materials

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I wrote recently about how I’ve been teaching an exciting new workshop based on my own translation work. I don’t think I can meaningfully turn it into an essay or article, but I do want to make the texts available, so… here are the texts, with original language transcriptions, but no explanations. Enjoy!

  1. Passage 1
  2. Passage 2
  3. Passage 3
  4. Passage 4
Continue reading “Latin Lew workshop materials” →

Come out and do the thing that nobody else can do

Darth Kendra2 Comments

Hello, my patient readers. Once again I have forgotten that National Coming Out Day is October 11th and not 12th.

A year ago, I wrote about deliberately taking control of “what I want to be famous for” as one piece of presenting a truer version of myself to the world.

I’m not sure I want to be famous, exactly. I want to share the things I learn, and I want my ideas to reach people who are excited to hear them. I love giving slide presentations, but they aren’t really the dominant medium in the sword community; simply the logistics of having a projector and audience seating are prohibitive. So off and on I think about offering a class that’s more like other people’s sword classes.

This year, I finally did. It was scary at first, but now that I know people like it, I’m excited to run the class again tomorrow.

The reason I didn’t try this sooner is not (really) that I’m better at public speaking than teaching. It definitely isn’t that I lacked ideas or material.

But until this year, I was thinking about it differently. I would think, most of the instructors I hear people get excited about are swords-in-hands technique workshops. Do people who are all about tournament fencing have any respect for me? Maybe I should turn some dagger demo choreography into a technique workshop. Am I even a HEMA instructor if I don’t teach a technique workshop?

In 2021, Iron Gate Exhibition invited me to teach. Because it was 2021, they were reinventing their format as a campout that didn’t require any enclosed indoor spaces. I had given slide lectures at off-grid camping events before, but I thought this was a good opportunity to challenge myself to some post-pandemic reinvention.

Maybe it was time for that dagger technique workshop idea, I thought. But– if this event, organized by people who know me, is inviting me to teach at their event, they probably are hoping for something recognizably Darth Kendra. They might know how much I love dagger, but if they wanted a dagger technique workshop, they would have called Kimmie Roseblade.

And so I invented Primary Source Storytime, because I decided that the real core of Darth Kendra is showing people the exciting parts of primary sources, and what’s more camping-compatible than stories?

(I’m going to come back to the theme of coming out as your genuine self, stick with me.)

Fast forward to 2024. I applied to teach at the Western Martial Arts Workshop. It’s a pretty big deal event, and a great time to bust out something new and exciting. But it’s also an event that has access to a lot of top-notch instructors. To stand out among a lot of other submissions, I needed to pitch something that only I could offer.

That didn’t require a ton of introspection: nobody but me can teach a class about my unpublished translation work. In 2023 I gave a presentation at Kalamazoo about “the space between languages” and weird little things we can learn by comparing contemporary translations and their source texts. Among those details were some things that athletic fencers might even find useful to perfect their techniques.

And then I heard back from WMAW, who wanted to hear a pitch for “the secret geekout talk you always wanted to give,” and I thought, to heck with convenient formats and logistics, I’m going to say what I actually want, and let everyone around me help me make it happen.

Tomorrow will be the fourth time I run my new class in which people read and interpret a text translated from Paulus Hektor Mayr‘s Latin manuscript, and then read and interpret the same technique translated from PHM’s German, and can feel the space between the languages in their own hands and bodies.

Each time has been better than the last. After each class, I feel energized and excited and people keep finding me throughout the rest of the day to tell me they loved the class and they’re still thinking about it and they think the new perspective might un-stick interpretations they’ve been chewing on for years. Michael is excited about other things we could team-teach using this format.

And that’s why it’s important to do the thing nobody else can do, think about what matters to you and know what you really care about, ask for the things you want, and share your off-the-wall ideas you’ve never seen anyone else do.

It’s not just awesome for you– it’s awesome for everyone you share with.

Under the shadow

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This time next week, I will be on an eclipse trip under-standing the shadow with my family, and thinking about all of the people sharing that experience, and the profound and powerful human eclipse experience throughout history. I thought I’d write a little about it.

I don’t think I’ve looked at a manuscript that had eclipse-related illustrations, but I was able to search and find one, with the help of the British Library. This is from BL Burney MS 169, folio 69r, and it shows Alexander of Macedonia consulting astrologers after the battle of Arbela while his army gazes up in awe.

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I wrote some stuff about this illustration assuming it depicted a solar eclipse somewhat oddly, before I noticed that the British Library blog article specifies it’s a lunar eclipse. Whoops. So instead I will write: I love this picture of soldiers witnessing an astronomical event together, and I especially love the radiating curves around the moon.

Eclipses in chronicles and art are important because they allow scholars to, among other things, align humanity’s various calendar systems to a precise reference point.

You can read more about eclipses in pre-modern records at these links, in increasing order of length and complexity:

There are medieval manuscripts with astronomical diagrams of eclipses in them, and verbal descriptions, but other than the above, I didn’t have a lot of luck finding manuscript illustrations of people witnessing eclipses.

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So, let me try again with a solar eclipse: this is a detail of “Dionysius the Areopagite Converting the Pagan Philosophers” by Antoine Caron (previously exhibited as “Astronomers studying an eclipse”). It was painted in the 1570s, and thus would have been informed by experiences and descriptions of a solar eclipse in 1571. However, this doesn’t look like a painting of eclipse totality to me– and indeed, EclipseWise suggests the totality path only barely touched Gibraltar.

For a complete discussion of the details of the painting, including an analysis of what kind of solar phenomenon it might show, read this 5-page article helpfully archived by NASA and Harvard. Spoiler: the authors don’t think it’s an accurate depiction of any kind of eclipse. Perhaps more interestingly, they go on to list a variety of interesting astronomical phenomena that could have inspired it.

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Here’s one more eclipse from art history, which does appear to depict totality! Specifically, as the moon comes into perfect alignment with the sun, the sliver of sunlight around the edge squeezes down smaller and smaller, until the sunlight seems to form a thin circle with a single splash of bright light for a moment. That moment is called the diamond ring.

You can read more about the painting at this “Eclipses in art” web exhibit.

The early eighteenth century was an exciting time for eclipses in Europe, with total or annular eclipses crossing the region in 1706, 1708, 1715, and 1724. Cosmas Damian Asam painted his first work of Saint Benedict’s vision in 1726, but the one I’ve chosen here was painted in 1735. You can read more about Asam and St. Benedict in this 30-page paper.

The early eighteenth century was also a great time for eclipses because it’s when precise calculations of where eclipses could be seen became possible– and thus, it became possible to make sure to be in the right place. I had no idea that eclipse travel had such a long history! You can read more in this Smithsonian article on the history of eclipse chasing or this Atlas Obscura article about Edmond Halley’s eclipse maps. One of Halley’s goals in creating the maps was to make the phenomena less startling and confusing, and thus easier to appreciate as astronomical wonder. People who are tired of hearing about eclipses this year now know who to shake their fist at. I hope my readers who are in that population will forgive me this deviation from my usual 15th and 16th century manuscript material– I know I’m overdue for rambles about armor art, and I will try not to make you wait too much longer.

Glamorous paleography: nasal capital review

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Dearest readers, I try sometimes to share the real honest process of manuscript research with you. And so, here’s my translation project from this week: comparing every capital N or M in the Florius manuscript.

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You see, we realized some sentences we thought started with “Me” (a reflexive pronoun) might actually start with “Ne” (which negates verbs), meaning we had thought we had sentences like “I cover myself” that might actually say “I don’t cover.”

Our conclusion? The manuscript features at least three capital Ns and two capital Ms… and this ambiguous letter appears as both, but probably mostly as N. So now we need to go back and re-read all of those ambiguous sentences to see which version makes more sense.

Also, I found one place where we had read a capital H as a capital N, so I guess we’ll fix that too.

Anyway, if you’ve always wanted to see every nasal capital– that is, M or N– in the Paris Fiore manuscript, here they are in order. Viewing the manuscript– or the text– like this, what do you notice that you’ve never seen before?

I was surprised by how much the definition of the brush strokes varies, and the opacity or darkness of the ink. This is all the official high-quality BnF photography, so the scribe and not the camera is probably responsible for variations in crispness.

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Come out and be known as your truer self

Darth Kendra3 Comments

I’m a couple days late for Coming Out Day, but I know you always enjoy my reflective writing.

People have been asking me lately when I’m going to give a presentation about historical swordswomen again. And… I wasn’t really planning to. But I think it’s probably time to reexamine that choice.

There are a lot of reasons I haven’t felt excited about going back to it. When I was working on updating and expanding it, a bunch of stressful stuff was going on in my life, including a lot of tension and frustration with someone who was working on the project with me. Going back to the subject feels too much like going back to all of that, to the extent that I’ve never put it on my Lectures and Recordings page.

But the reason that comes into my mind first is, that’s not what I want to be famous for. I don’t want to be remembered as the woman who works on woman stuff. Historical swordfighting is a very male-dominated space, and I’ve been navigating that my entire adult life, trying to find the right amount of “remind the men that people who aren’t men exist and are different” and trying not to worry about “they won’t take me (or maybe any woman) seriously if I’m not man enough.”

So… I have this presentation I don’t want to be famous for, but it’s already something people remember about me and, more importantly, want more of. Which I guess means I have an opportunity to reshape their perception.

And it’s information that needs to be put out into the world again, because for the love of kittens, “cool non-man swordfighters” does not begin and end with La Maupin and basically none of those meme pictures are actually of her anyway. And also her story usually has wacky exaggerated genderfuckery fingerprints all over it, like some 18th or 19th century person said “aha, a story with non-mainstream gender and sexuality! Allow me to impose some of my ideas about gender onto it to make sure you notice gender things are happening but also reassure you that women are ladylike and attracted to men!” Like the bit where she stabs a guy in a duel but then tenderly nurses him back to health before having sex with him. Or the thing where her early serious relationship with a woman is only discussed as the framing for why she set the convent on fire and is otherwise elided to a couple sentences.

I guess I have more to say about this topic.

So.

The world needs me to share more information about individual non-men fighters, and probably also broader categories of non-men who were doing combat and defense stuff, and point out that a lot of the gender division ideas we modern folk have about the medieval era were given to us by the historians of intervening centuries.

And I need to find ways to do that– all of that– without feeling like I’m compromising my own priorities for presenting my identity to others.

I think the first step to making it manageable is to separate it into two topics, because I think it would be difficult and also unhelpful to simultaneously cover “binary gender has been imposed onto history in weird ways” and “gender and sexuality are not binary.” Taken separately, I think each of those topics fits better with the current Darth Kendra brand than the old presentation does.

I suspect a lot of you are now wondering, Darth Kendra, what do you want to be famous for? Because, you’re right, I shouldn’t define myself by what I don’t want. And I think if I have to boil it all down to one single idea, that idea is READ ALL THE MANUSCRIPTS. I don’t want to be remembered as the person with all the ladies in armor pictures, or the merfolk pictures, or even as the Florius translator– I want all of those to be taken together to create a big picture of “Darth Kendra will read everything unstoppably when she’s on the trail of something interesting, and then (sooner or later) share the journey and also the discovery at the end.”

While I’m talking about ways I intend to be more out and true, I’m resolving to put more stickers on my HEMA gear. I think– I’m trying to believe– that using my gear to celebrate some things I love, and thus share a little more of my truer self with everyone I fight, will make me stronger and healthier. Even– or, no, especially– if some of those things are definitely not manly, like glitter pastel cottagecore and fluffy cats sitting by rainy windows.

We can’t stop here, this is wombat country

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So, I went to Las Vegas. (Please supply your own Show Biz Kids reference.) Michael Chidester and I brought HEMA Bookshelf to CombatCon, and we both also taught some classes.

I have been politely referring to some parts of the trip as “misadventures” and “learning experiences,” but in the interest of transparency, “minor disasters” is probably more accurate. If my recounting sounds less than glowing, please read that not as a reflection on Vegas or CombatCon, but a natural consequence of having an unexpected 17 hour layover on the way in. Case in point, this probably isn’t the right place to start my story, but here we are.

Let me skip to a different part of the story, then! I did Primary Source Storytime and it was great– it was the most continuous reading I’ve done yet, filling a whole hour with three substantial pieces. (Past installments have been more like 20-40 minutes of reading at a time.) I was delighted to find that not only did my voice hold out, but also the audience seemed totally engaged the whole time. When I first had the idea for Primary Source Storytime, I hoped people would like it, but every time I sit down to read at a new event I get a little nervous that this’ll be the time it’s boring. So far, you keep proving me wrong and being fascinated, and that’s why you’re great.

Also, for the second time someone sketched while listening, and gave me the drawing, which is of an ox-like grazing fish creature described in one of the readings. After someone at Swordsquatch showed me their sketchbook, I hoped something similar might happen at a subsequent storytime, and it was even more delightful than I imagined.

Here’s the drawing anchoring my CombatCon and Vegas haul pile:

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Not shown: awesome shadow Meyer pocket leggings from Ox & Plow, two Meow Wolf plush creatures, and some shiny things that must remain secret until they’re presented as gifts. Also a rainbow bracelet by What The Cat Made that I forgot to take off and put in the picture. And the Penn & Teller merch. You’re learning why I don’t usually do haul pile pictures.

If you came to this blog hoping to get more info about the texts that I read at storytime, you’re in luck!

The first piece was “The Knight under the Baking Tub” from Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany by Albrecht Classen. This book was recommended to me by the amazing Jess Finley, with the comment “I didn’t really understand the medieval idea of pursuit until I read these stories.” The stories are not (to my eye) erotic in the modern “pornographic, causing sexual excitement” sense, but they do generally concern what happens before and/or after people have sex, like how many sexual encounters constitute appropriate barter for one really cute pet bunny.

The second piece was “Battered and Bruised: A Translation of the ‘Fish-Knights’ Episode from Perceforest” by Coline Blaizeau. This curious and thought-provoking bit of adventure was recommended to me by the excellent Katie Vernon who helped me connect medieval images of merfolk in armor to contemporary fiction. If you want to read more of Perceforest in modern English, Blaizeau suggests Nigel Bryant’s 2011 book. I have read and liked another of Bryant’s translations, so I feel good repeating the recommendation.

The third piece was a selection of chapters from Michael Chidester’s transcription and edition of Thomas Bedingfield’s 1580 translation of Paride del Pozzo‘s Italian treatise on dueling jurisprudence. (Whew.) Michael published those and more chapters on his Patreon throughout 2021 and plans to return to the project someday when his book-publishing schedule chills out. If a lot of you subscribe to the Patreon and ask for more Pozzo, maybe someday he’ll publish a version with a title that’s easier to cite.

While at CombatCon, I also took classes from Steaphen Fick, Morgana Alba, and Simone Belli, which were all excellent. This is the most hands-on workshops I’ve attended at a single event in a long time, and even though it made HEMA Bookshelf table coverage hard to schedule I’m really glad I did. I learned new things in every class, and I spoke up and asked questions and got things wrong (but not as much as I thought I would). All this sword travel is often exhausting, but getting to learn new things and see different teaching styles and learn old things in new ways keeps me coming back for more.

At the risk of explaining a joke, the armored plushie in the photo is an official Combat Wombat.