Lacking a living tradition of Thibault’s style, we must reconstruct it from what we read in L’Academie de l’Espée and what we can learn by our own experience. We acknowledge that our practice cannot replicate what the man would have taught us in his salle, and so we set our intent firmly on developing and improving a practical HEMA rapier style derived predominantly from what Thibault describes in his manual. To that end, while individual fencers are free to develop their individual style, this page serves as a hub for research material and our collective understanding of what Thibault has written and depicted.
There are a couple of places you can get a translation of the text.
The Wiktenauer version also includes a transcription of the original French text. The language is a little archaic, but fairly readable by someone with good modern French proficiency. Hint: that ſ character isn’t an f, it’s an s.
High Quality Plates
While the scans of the engravings are totally acceptable from both
Wiktenauer and the Greer translation, the highest quality scans are
available from Geheugen van Nederland. As the search function of that site does not return results in order, we have republished them here.
NoCo Thibault Rapier 