It's not that the Art is evolving (it hasn't been fully resurrected yet and has no environment to shape it), but our
understanding of the Art is evolving. I'm one of those old timers (10 years now) Sal mentioned and we definitely see and understand things differently now than we did back when I began or even just a few years ago. A lot of this has to do with cumulative experience, and extended exposure to the sources (which continue to increase in number as we plumb the libraries) coupled with years of experimentation and analysis.
What ARMA does differently than most other groups is that we don't just take each manual individually and try to understand it in isolation (though that is a part of what we do). The holistic approach means we cross-compare ALL of the historical sources and look for recurring patterns, ideas, and concepts which tie all the masters together and define the larger concept of "Renaissance Martial Arts" from a theoretical basis. We then take that theoretical core knowledge and reapply it back to individual manuals that maybe we didn't fully understand before and see what questions it answers and what new ones it generates, then reexamine our core concepts and repeat the process. We have done this enough times now to where our core understanding is able to answer
most (but not all) of our questions about the manuals, but it took a long time and a lot of exploration of blind alleys and incorrect assumptions to get here, and along the way we've had to learn to break habits we developed in earlier phases of our journey. It's a process we never really expect to end, though it will probably slow down as we get closer to the truth, and even if we do reach a full understanding of the Art, as Swetnam says, a man may "practice all the daies of his life."
