It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday, in a third-floor room at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Franklin Street Gymnasium. Undergraduates in black workout attire stand in a circle, not far from an array of rapiers on the wooden floor. “The broadswords of the medieval period were basically sharp baseball bats,“ theater professor Aaron Anderson explains cheerily. He demonstrates how you’d wallop an opponent’s nose with the blunt end of a broadsword. His audience—undergraduate students in an advanced movement class—watch, rapt.