Stephen Hand
Stephen Hand was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1964. In 1979 he joined a medieval re-enactment group and soon came to the conclusion that medieval swordsmanship must have been more sophisticated than the made up styles that re-enactors were using. For several years he studied modern fencing and kendo before discovering that there were surviving historical fencing manuals. Rapidly exhausting the available secondary sources, Stephen decided to analyse two of these manuals, George Silver’s
Bref Instruction Upon my Paradoxes of Defence and
Vincentio Saviolo His Practise line by line.
A series of articles by Stephen, analysing Saviolo’s
Practise was published in the magazine
Hammerterz Forum between 1997 and 1999. Since then Stephen has become editor of
Spada, the world’s only peer reviewed journal dedicated to the history of swordsmanship and has written nearly twenty papers and books on the subject. Stephen's Magnum Opus,
English Swordsmanship: The True Fight of George Silver was released in 2006 and his latest book,
Swordplay in the Age of Shakespeare, an introduction to the works of Giacomo di Grassi, Vincentio Saviolo, George Silver and Joseph Swetnam will be released in the second half of 2010.
Since May 2000 Stephen has been travelling around the world on a regular basis to teach historical fencing to historical fencers, re-enactors, stage combatants and fight directors. He is a popular teacher at swordplay symposia and in his own seminars. In 2001 Stephen won the rapier fencing tournament at Westrn Martial Arts Workshop in 2001, beating a field of competitors from three continents.