Nicoletto Giganti’s Rapier: Book II

I am proud to present to you perhaps my most ambitious sword related video project to date, Nicoletto Giganti’s 1608 fencing treatise. While he covers most of the fundamentals in book I, in book II he presents to us some of the more advanced techniques as well as how to deal with cuts and fight with and against weapon sets outside of just single rapier and rapier and dagger. Giganti is by and far my favorite fencing author of all time and I am excited to be able to bring his work to life in a more accessible format. In book I the plays can be divided up by their corresponding plate numbers. Book II isn’t structured in quite the same way, so instead I went with the page numbers in the English translation, which can be found here among other places: As a note, it appears I hit the wrong button when trying to record the material for page 115, so the one sword and targe play unfortunately didn’t make it into this video. There are also a few pages throughout the text that are just theory without any direct plays described, so those I intentionally didn’t try and shoot video of. Big shout out to my provost, Gregory Setnik (Alessandro Vitturi Da Canal), for agreeing to get stabbed roughly 200 times for this and for helping me work through some of the less straightforward plays. No provosts were permanently injured in the making of this video. For my full write up on this feel free to take a look over here: To follow my latest research, please feel free to subscribe to my newsletter: