Last year, Britain’s Royal Armouries Museum published my new
translation of their manuscript I.33. Dating to the early 1300s, the manuscript
is the oldest surviving treatise on swordfighting. To celebrate the new book,
the Armouries organized a daylong conference on the manuscript at the museum on
May 10, followed by a weekend of hands-on workshops on the techniques of I.33
and related systems of combat.
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| Folio 32r, Royal Armouries MS I.33 (detail) |
I was of course delighted when the Armouries asked me to be
keynote speaker for the conference! I first began working on I.33 back in the
1990s, when I was fresh out of graduate school, coming over to see the
manuscript at the Tower of London in 1994 and at the Armouries’ new museum in
Leeds in 1996. In fact, it was my work on I.33 that brought me into the arms
and armor world, playing a major role in getting me hired as the Paul S. Morgan
Curator at the Higgins Armory in 1999. So coming to Leeds was quite the stroll
down memory lane!
It was also a look into the future—over the weekend I saw
many excellent presentations and workshops by some very talented, skilled, and
creative scholars and practitioners. Nowadays I am phasing out my work on early
combat treatises to focus my attention on the permanent installation of arms
and armor at WAM. But I can do so in good conscience knowing that I’m leaving
the field to an admirable cohort of successors who will build on my research in
new and exciting directions in the years to come.
—Jeffrey L. Forgeng, The Higgins Curator of Arms & Armor
and Medieval Art
May 20, 2019
