The Steel Marginalia
Notes in the margins. Truth in the bind.
A group dedicated to close reading of fencing manuals, reconstructing technique from text and image, and turning historical fragments into living martial knowledge.
We work from the primary text: the treatise itself, in the original language and in translation, examined for internal consistency and compared against the broader tradition. Interpretation follows from what the master wrote, not from received consensus or modern reconstruction habit. When the text is ambiguous we say so. When it is clear we follow it.
About the group →The Record entire — long sword, mounted figures, and the judicial duel — translated fresh from the manuscript transcriptions, every witness switchable per row, with a manuscript comparison across the whole tradition.
The whole treatise, grappling to mounted fencing, read folio by folio: translations from the manuscript transcriptions, a plain flow of actions for every plate, and a manuscript comparison and glossological analysis for every page.
Working through the full sequence of single-sword plates in Book I: cataloguing tactical and mechanical principles, correcting translations, and building a reading apparatus — glossary, lexicon, cross-references — to support the analysis.