Rapier & Buckler/Targa Guards & Postures

We’re wrapping up rapier & buckler/targa month in my Beyond the Basics class. It’s been fun adapting Italian rapier to a form that’s pretty glossed over by the late-Renaissance masters.

Like I wrote in my last post, there’s not a ton about buckler/targa use in the late-Renaissance Italian rapier manuals (Fabris, Capoferro, Giganti, Alfieri). We either need to go back in time a bit into the “sidesword” tradition or move forward in time to the late-17th/early-18th century for more specific buckler advice.

Both of those are perfectly fine. It’s relatively easy to adapt Bolognese sidesword to Italian rapier and the Italians were still using rapier in the later half of the 17th C into the 18th C. But for this post, we’re sticking with early to mid-1600s.

In general, when it comes to buckler or targa use with the rapier, the Italian masters’ advice can be summed up as:

1. Use the dagger guards
2. Use the buckler similar to dagger
3. All previous fencing principles still apply

We looked at how to hold the buckler/targa and some simple closed-guard transitions in the last post. This post will focus more on guard formations & postures. And while we go through these, we’re going to really focus on the above three points.

How to Hold a Buckler for Rapier & Simple Guard Transitions

March is Buckler & Targa Month for my Beyond the Basics of Italian Rapier class, and we kicked things off by looking at some buckler fundamentals.

In this blog, I’m focusing primarily on the round buckler and the square/wavy targa, but this can be carried over to other buckler-like objects such as the various talhoffer bucklers.

In the class I tend to jump back & forth between shapes to show how I’d change things a little based on the item’s design, but my grip approach is more or less always the same.