Historical?

[Robert Blackmann]

Not wishing to Spam the forum (the only one I'm on) or upset anyone.

An open question: Does anyone actually stick to one old master or type i.e German, Italian ect?

Some of the stuff I've seen posted around the internet seems very elitest and uptight and then a gaggle of fanboys chirping along behind.
An example would be the krumphau, who really knows how it was done and when, there are probably a dozen different ways of doing it depending on the situation and interpretations constantly evolve as they should.
I have decided to drop the "historical" or should I say hysterical and just focus on two handed sword. Yes there's a gap of 500 odd years but I've come to the conclusion it's all pretty much of a muchness. The old texts are fantastic in there own right and back then across mainland Europe and England everyone was doing much the same thing just with different names.

[David Kite]

Hi Robert,

It sounds like for the most part your approach agrees with ARMA's, with the exception that we definitely stick with the "historical." There are those out there who stick with one master or one "tradition" (less so one single source, anymore), but our approach tends toward the holistic. There is nothing wrong with either approach, depending on your motivations and conceptions of what you're doing or want to do.

For example, ARMA members study the span of Renaissance Martial Arts from roughly 1300-1650, and while some of us may focus on one source or another, we refer to all of them available in order to get the most complete picture of what fencing may actually have looked like. I would also agree that most of our sources pretty much describe the same or similar things, but they conceptualized fighting differently and so presented in the sources differently.

Looking at your Krumphau example, I have largely let go of the notion that there was a "the" krumphau (or "the" zwerchau or "the" shielhau, what-have-you), and more "a" krumphau, or a way of striking krump or a way of striking zwerch, etc. Granted most sources describe the strikes very similarly, but personally I think that the underlying concepts are more important than a rigid taxonomy.

I think you're right that no one really "knows" for certain how things were done or what it looked like, but I think can get pretty close as long as you approach it with the right mindset.

But you have to stick with the old texts, otherwise you're just making it up, and I would bet that anything anyone could come up with today would be inferior to what the sources could teach us.

(and be as active here as you want and ask as many questions as you can. Another good forum to try is Schola Gladiatoria at fioredeiliberi.org/phpBB3)
David Kite
ARMA in IN