Periods and weapons studied by the Arma

[Tim Gallagher]

This is a question specifically aimed at the more established Arma members on this forum.
Do I understand correctly that the Arma is now focused on those martial arts for which a European manual exists? Specifically, the weapons (and unarmed skills) from 1.33 onwards into the rapier manuals of 17th century?
Am I right in thinking that the Arma is no longer particularly focused on large shield use and non-sword hand weapons from the period before 1300 (when 1.33 was written)?
I ask because that is one of my main areas of interest and that the articles section and the forum don't seem to address either very much in recent years.

Tim

[Randall Pleasant]

Tim

You are correct. ARMA studies the Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (MARE), which is a small subset of Western Martial Arts (WMA). During my 10 years with ARMA we have never studied large shield fighting such as done by the Viking.

[Stacy Clifford]

There is a little bit of shield material here and there in later sources like Di Grassi, but for the most part Ran is right. That's not to say you can't spend some of your own effort on those things if you are a member of ARMA, but as an organization our curriculum is focused on what we have the best chance of reconstructing accurately, which is the extensive body of work of the Renaissance masters. If earlier sources containing sword and shield were to turn up then we might add them in, but without direct written sources to study from we have no way to gauge the accuracy of any attempts to reconstruct that type of fight. If you want to understand something about a poorly documented period of history, however, learning about an adjacent time period with better documentation is not a bad place to start.