Thanks! I’m enjoying it thoroughly.
There’s so much more to it than I ever imagined. I’m still of course very much a newbie, as was made painfully clear in the free-sparring I did with the instructors on Saturday. They’re good at keeping ya humble. Really humble.
I’m trying to plow through an enormous library of material. Maybe in a couple of years I’ll be ready to pretend to be authoritative. :-)
As an aside... while this organization has a certain process to work one’s way up from novice to “scholar” and perhaps to “instructor”... there are no “Masters” in the present day, and there may not be for a great long while, or ever. Not even the Director of the organization will call himself a “Master” even though he’s been studying this stuff for over twenty years and can pretty much kick anybody around that needs kicking around.
Of the various people you might see on the Internet that hold themselves out as “Master so-and-so, of Medieval Martial Arts”... take from that a great grain of salt...
The idea there is that the old Masters: Liechtenauer, Ringeck, Fiore, Dobringer and others... the guys that wrote the books and taught as “Masters” in Medieval/Renaissance Europe... they actually used these techiniques in real combat. For their lives. Often. That’s why they were considered “Masters” and why they were hired to teach others.
Nobody today is really ever going to be fighting for their very life with a sword, against another swordsman. Nomatter how realistic you try to make your practices... it’s just not going to ever have that essential element of the fight to the death. In that way, nobody in the modern world can ever really be qualified to take the title “Master” with a sword.
An interesting, and useful distinction, I think.