By Carolyn Page AE
On 6 June 2025, Editors NSW hosted this intriguing presentation. Event MC was Dr Jennifer Rowland AE while Marita Smith AE wrangled the questions. Jennifer described Dr Guy Windsor to us as “one of the foremost interpreters and teachers of medieval and Renaissance martial arts on the globe”.
Guy describes himself on Instagram as:
Swordsman; writer; founder of The School of European Swordsmanship; co-creator of the medieval combat card game Audatia; parent.
Guy describes his day job as finding and analysing medieval treatises on swordsmanship and using them to create a training syllabus for his students. His works include The swordsman’s companion (2004), The duellist’s companion (2006), The medieval dagger (2012) and, in 2013, he published a translation of, and commentary on, Philippo [Filipo] Vadi’s De arte gladiatoria dimicandi [The art of sword fighting in earnest] (1482-87). In 2018, Guy’s scholarly work earned him a doctoral degree by research publication from the University of Edinburgh.
Guy’s more recent books inform the training and research processes he, and his followers, use in their own practice. These titles include The medieval longsword (2014), From medieval manuscript to modern practice: the longsword techniques of Fiore dei Liberi (2020), and The Windsor method: the principles of solo training (2021).
So why does such an expert scholar and practitioner need an editor? To answer this question, Guy walked us through his experience of translating the 1410 manuscript of Il fior di battaglia [The flower of battle] by Fiore dei Liberi.
What this involved
First, Guy translated the original text from medieval Italian into modern English. (Checking with colleagues in the field for errors in interpretation of the original text is a good idea at this point – but not done with this book.)
Next came creating a facsimile of the original work in 2 parts, “so people could actually see what the book looks like and see the pictures and how the pictures relate to the text, transcriptions and translations”. The first half would be a “straight facsimile” of the original, and the second half would offer the same pages with Guy’s English translations inserted over the top of the original medieval text.
“There’s a lot of editing that goes on with this. As editors, I hope your brains are exploding at the complexity of this particular problem.”
The final stages involved working with the graphic designer on layout, with the printers on aspects of the printing process, and then checking the first printout.
“Yeah, that looks fine”
As Guy retells it:
When it came back from the printers, I thought “I should send it to the editors”, then “Nah! It’ll be fine”. It then went to the graphic designers, who saw that all the things were in the right place: the page numbers were right, and the gutters were right, and the layout was right, and that it was fine.
Then it went to me and I said, “Yeah, that looks fine.”
Then people started buying it … and after maybe 50 or so people had bought it, I realised that the last line of every paragraph in the translation was missing.
Between the graphic design file that the graphic designer had produced (which looked perfect), and all the automated checks with the printers, and printing out a hard copy, we weren’t looking for the text, we were looking for the layout.
We should have sent it to an editor – because an editor would have spotted it absolutely immediately.
From an Italian colleague Guy also learned, too late, that there had been an error in his interpretation of the original text. This required the editing-out of only a single word, in a single paragraph – but this change had implications for the meaning of the text (and for the training and audiovisual materials that had already been produced).
Links and layout
Guy has become a convert to the use of video clips to supplement description in his manuals, because it is “so much easier and more efficient”. By the time his training series is done, there will be 150 or 200 of these video clips. In his workbooks, Guy provides only basic instruction and space for notes, but no transcription or translation. A QR code provides a link to the video clip – but in the text of the workbooks “every one of those links will have to be right”.
The workbooks are also available in right-handed and left-handed layout, but “it only takes a graphic designer adding in a single page, and all that goes out the window”.
How does Guy find editors for his work?
Early in his career Guy got recommendations from friends, but now he relies on his mailing list, which contains about 6,000 people. This “keeps it in the family” because people on the list are already familiar with his work and “it simplifies things considerably”.
Guy also uses Reedsy (a marketplace for book production services, including graphic designers and editors)
My current editor (from Reedsy) is not a sword-content professional, but he is an editing professional, which means that when I put the wrong link in a place, he can spot it, and when my sentences don’t make sense, he can spot it, and when this paragraph belongs over there, he can spot it. The fundamental skills of being an editor are, I think, universal to whatever kind of book you are trying to write. You may need a content matter expert, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need copyediting, line editing, developmental editing, proofreading.
“Persnicketiness”
Guy concluded with this advice:
What people like me are looking for in an editor is persnicketiness. When I’m deep in [medieval swordplay content], I do tend to lose sight of where a comma should be … I lose sight of the fact that [I’ve used a word before I’ve explained it and] the reader will have no idea what I’m talking about.
It’s probably technically possible for someone with an editing mindset to do their own editing, but really? If the text has come out of your own brain, you know what you meant to say, and that’s what you see on the screen when you’re looking back over what you’ve written.
No matter how esteemed you may be as an expert practitioner or scholar, if you want to publish your writing, you will still need to employ an editor.