fbhjr | They let us in the basement!

It was a beautiful day and we headed out to the University of Massachusetts Renaissance Center for the 6th annual Conference on Historical Swordsmanship.

The conference got going about 10 in the morning.

The first talk was on the sword fight at the end of Hamlet with a discussion of the terms used and implications of that.

Then, it was our turn doing our presentation on mismatched weapons.

They may eventually be more pictures of what we did. My camera died just after Tom and

blue_micha did their bit from Fiore.

perrin_o_ravnos’s sister was taking photos for us and switched to her own camera and promises to give me copies.

Now I do like sword fighting. I do like researching historical methods of sword fighting. I very much like presenting that sort of thing to a group of people who are really into it, appreciate the work, research and have interesting and well thought out comments on it.

But, what I really like about the Renaissance center is that sometimes they let us in their basement where the archives are. It’s been two years since they let us down there so we jumped at the chance to go back down.

We started with the printing press in the outer basement.

There was someone actually doing printing there at the time setting the typeface and everything.
Then, we went to my favorite part, their archives.

Many of their books are not that old. Some are only a couple of years old. But, even at that it is a very large collection that fills most of the basement on subjects that I really like. (History, art, philosophy, and research books on that.
But, they have one section that has the really old books.
Jeff, the office manager there, showed us some of the originals up to 450 years old.

One of the oldest one they have is a Spanish book that is the records of a convent that spans several centuries. The director of the center bought it at a yard sale in Spain when he was there at a conference.
A large room full of books on the subjects I love. They could have just closed the door behind me and I would have been there for a long, long time.
But, the symposium went on and I didn’t want to miss my wife’s part.
So, back upstairs I went.

The research was presented by the group my wife works with on Monday nights. It is the same group that had her do the demonstration at Smith College last month.

(Don’t know if you can tell, but they’re using one of the pictures of it on the screen there.)

Then, my wife and Amy went outside and presented the interpretation of how to do it.

Finally ARMS presented a new interpretation of one of the sequences I first learned at the Higgins museum 8 or so years ago in a class my wife and I took with

brickhousewench.