How to employ the Vienna Anonymous to improve your practice - part 1

Thank you for your patience

Things are still pretty helter-skelter with my job and life, so my thanks for your enduring patience if some of my releases are a bit late. I hope to bring us back on track with this multi-part series digging into the Vienna Anonymous manuscript - what it is, what it means, and what we can learn from it.

So ONWARD, my renaissance sword friends!

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The Vienna Anonymous manuscript - filling in some gaps

So what is this “Vienna Anonymous?”

The manual we refer to as “the Vienna Anonymous” is 53 handwritten pages sewn together into a single gathering housed in the princely collection of the Liechtenstein Museum/palace in Vienna - MS 381. It is a brief original treatise by an unknown author on the use of the rapier.

As described by the author of the translation I work from, Tom Leoni: “Sometime in the early second decade of the 17th century, an anonymous fencer took it upon himself to write a detailed explanation of the art of the single rapier by closely referencing (and expanding on) the written instruction of Salvatore Fabris and Ridolfo Capoferro.”¹  

There are references throughout the manual to actions and pages from Fabris, Capoferro, and an “L.S.” In some cases almost entire passages are repeated from those manuals. This means, for me, that this contemporary author held the position that Capoferro and Fabris (and whoever this “L.S.” was) were teaching from the same system, or close enough that the instruction in their manuals were complementary or even interchangeable. This is, my loyal readers will note, largely how I define and approach the Northern Italian system.

Indeed - though I am mostly known for my interpretation of Capoferro’s system, I would argue that the text that I most base my teachings on is now the Vienna Anonymous, followed by Capoferro, Giganti, and then Fabris.

The Vienna Anonymous manuscript fills in some of the details that were glossed over or left out of the other manuals. The author stopped writing in September of 1614, but the goal seems to have been to finish and publish the work. The several internal references to numbered plates suggest that the plan was to include illustrations, for instance.

Also interesting - this book was finished in Egra, which is modern day Cheb in the Czech Republic, a short drive from German Bavaria.

C.13 and MS 17533

In this same vein, there’s also the c.13 and MS 17533.  These are two largely identical books, one written by Johann Pascha, dated to 1671, and the other probably by the fencing master Heinrich von und zum Velde, dated to the middle of the 17th century.  These seem to be copies of another original text.

The first part of c.13 is the main treatise, and contains a technical discussion on fencing with the single rapier based on the teachings of Fabris, followed by 428 lessons where the principles are applied.  The third part discusses “proceeding with resolution” and the fourth part is a very short discussion of Thibault’s style of fencing.

MS 17533 is effectively the same, with fewer lessons, and with 93 drawings accompanying.  

I have yet to go through these fully, but it’s next on my fencing “to read and process” list.

Why these are so important

For our purposes, these are all books written as further explanations or applications of Fabris and Capoferro.  Effectively these are explanatory notes on the Northern Italian system as written down by someone who lived and studied while Fabris, Capoferro, and Giganti were all alive and active.  These are a look into the salle, if you will, where these styles were being actively taught.  

So hopefully you can see why the Vienna Anonymous (VA) and the others are a gold mine.

While some have dismissed the VA as “I didn’t learn anything particularly new from it,” that in itself should thrill the student of historical fencing! That means that our modern pedagogy based on decades of trial and error is close enough to the mark that the VA doesn’t contradict it, and almost wholly supports it. That’s thrilling for those of us working in this world of applied history!

Here in this series I want to discuss some of the main ways the VA changed or informed (or reinforced) my practice and instruction.