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Fighting with the Longsword: Modern-day HEMA Practices
If the goal is realism, then the inevitable, unavoidable and logical conclusion of this
objective
is
that
the
ultimate
touchstone
of
skill
is
the
fight
of
two
Blossfechter
(unprotected protagonists) with sharp blades.
34
Those who promote subjective “good historical technique” are more common, but also
raise an issue: How do we judge what is historical, and what is good technique? The
danger lies in emphasising a preconceived concept of technique to the point that it
creates an overly narrow form, a development similar to that of Olympic fencing or of
Capoeira.
Ultimately, a tournament bout represents training with a non-cooperative partner under
additional pressure and high motivation towards success, and is by those means a
necessary ingredient to the process of evaluating HEMA reconstruction efforts, while
putting heavy demands on physical fitness. It is hard to deny that those are the most
basic elements of a physical application of these arts.
V.
CONCLUSIONS
The efforts of HEMA (in the context of this article German and Italian longsword
based on fight books of the 15
th
century) focus on reconstructing combat techniques
from period manuscripts written on the subject, and evaluating said reconstructions
with as large a pool of fencers as possible, in a non-cooperative competitive setting
under high pressure. Since each individual fencer represents a data point, HEMA
facilitates making the discipline as accessible as possible to modern practitioners, and to
promote occasions where fencers can meet to fence each other. This enlarges our data
pool and allows us to make corrections to interpretations.
This focus on accessibility to modern audiences has led to the adoption of modern
clothing and aesthetics, as well as more modern safety standards, while striving to
replicate the function if not the form of medieval garments. Academic researchers are
uncomfortable with this casual loss of purity.
35
In our view, the results of this conference show that HEMA has so far been successful
in our endeavour, in that modern clothing has only a minor impact on practice;
36
so
while modern clothing undeniably leads to a loss of authenticity, this effect is small and
outweighed
by
the
explosive
expansion
of
the
data-set
of
experiences
and
interpretations made available. The HEMA experience is, we would argue, opening
34 This is the premise of Michael Edelson’s The Talhoffer Society (n.p.: CreateSpace, 2016).
35
See e.g. Jaquet/Sørensen, HEMA, p. 20; while the authors acknowledge the academic position,
academic research is not (yet) able to provide definitive answers regarding the application and
target audiences of the Fechtbücher (ibid., pp. 9-14 and passim, or Deacon, Prologues), so leaving the
practitioner unsure about what to aim for.
36 See the presentations of Etienne von Gunten and Julia Gräf given at the conference.