The Historical European Martial Arts (H.E.MA.) discipline consists of studying the fighting methods and fighting systems that existed on the European ground in his past, distant or close, on the base of historical sources, mostly using fighting treatises and fighting manuscripts left by masters or students back then.
It covers a range of practices as wide and varied as the medieval fencing using longsword, using sword and buckler, dagger fighting, medieval wrestling or later fighting systems like Renaissance rapier, Sherlock Holmes era self defense system (bartitsu/bartisu) or even bayonet fencing as taught to World War 1 soldiers.
It is notable that what matters the most, is the process, which consists in picking a source and giving it a life. It can also be a non-European source should you fancy it.
So we could say we are doing Historical Martial Arts (HMA) – mostly European ones.
Our instructors take the time to share their approches and knwoledges about the different practices during our classes.
In the domain of HEMA, there is no instructor per se (strictly speaking). By definition, the only true owners of the martial knowledge are deceased a long time ago, so people nowadays are just a bunch of persons trying to rebuild and reenact the gesture as it could have been performed back then, and we do so using the historical evidences found.
So we’re not in a structure with a “master” owning his knowledge and passing it to his “apprentices“, we’re all a group of apprentices trying to decode the knowledge of the master, Johannes Liechtenauer for instance. Each and everyone in the club may come with a training proposal in order to test an interpretation of a text so that everyone can work on it during a class.
Nevertheless, some more experienced members share the elements they already had the opportunity to practice to the newcomers not confident enough to work on the sources by themselves.
To have a visual idea of what it means to practice HEMA, you can also watch the following video links:
- Report by “Spiegel”
- Medieval Weapon Finds Modern Appeal – by the New York Times
- Nota Bene – Les arts Martiaux Historiques Européens – Reportages (FR)
- All the videos on this page
- Report by Al Jazeera – Keeping medieval sword fighting alive
- Back to the source, excellent documentary covering the key aspects of HEMA