"The Scholarship isn't Divorced from the Practice."

October 29, 2015 2:29 PM

Back to the Source is a documentary by Cédric Hauteville about Historical European Martial Arts, which is the modern study and practice of historical western fighting techniques as documented in period texts.

Many weapons and fighting styles fall under the HEMA umbrella, but the most popular seems to be longsword fencing.

• HEMA Alliance (find a local club)
• Western Martial Arts subreddit
• Previously on MetaFilter

posted by usonian (14 comments total)

I would comment on this, but:

a.) I haven't watched it.

b.) I'm going outside to swing my montante around right now.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:37 PM on October 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I read your comments in the previous thread, Steely-eyed Missile Man - I'd be interested to hear your take on it. It touches on some of the points you raised about HEMA figuring out whether it's tournament sport or a martial art. And a couple of guys who have developed a top-secret gauntlet that's not in production yet.

As for me, I took a semester of foil fencing in college and it was fun and interesting, but fell shy of really grabbing me. I watched that NYT video last fall and thought to myself "Wow, that looks much more like something I could get into, but I'm not all that interested in the competitive aspect." This documentary goes broader and deeper, and seems to indicate that a lot depends on the makeup and focus of a given local club.
posted by usonian at 4:05 PM on October 29, 2015

And SoCal Swordfight is coming up in just over a week if you decide you need to see some in person!
posted by agentofselection at 4:05 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Haven't finished watching the documentary yet, but it's really interesting! I've never heard of HEMA before, but it seems to be an athletic outgrowth of the historical reenactor culture. They're trying to recreate an entire lost art from primary sources. Very cool.

I wonder if this is maybe a glimpse of our post-industrial future, when robots have all the jobs and people turn to more humanistic skills and arts to keep themselves busy. Maybe we'll rediscover all the lost arts and cultural skills and practice them for fun in the age of high technology.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:48 PM on October 29, 2015

Oh hey, I hung out at my local chapter of ARMA when I was in college. I'd still have my waster, too, except I lost it in that house fire back in 2013. I gotta say, while it was fun, it also had the air of a sport with a lot of who's more macho than whom pissing contests surrounding it... which contributed to why I eventually went off it and wandered away later on.
posted by sciatrix at 4:49 PM on October 29, 2015

I've never heard of HEMA before, but it seems to be an athletic outgrowth of the historical reenactor culture.

Quite a lot of the "older" WMA/HEMA people came from or still have ties to the SCA, so you're not far off there. We're deep into second-wave HEMA now, though, where I think new folks are in the minority if they're from SCA-land.

I hung out at my local chapter of ARMA when I was in college...it...had the air of a sport with a lot of who's more macho than whom pissing contests

Yeah, that's ARMA for you (from everything I have heard, anyway). But ARMA =/= HEMA (as in the community entire) by a damn sight.

Twenty minutes in; time to feed the kitties.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:58 PM on October 29, 2015

"They were kind enough to write all this down for us and to let us to argue about it on the internet incessantly, for the next, you know, hundred years." 22:08

Yes!
posted by shoesfullofdust at 5:05 PM on October 29, 2015

Yeah, that's ARMA for you (from everything I have heard, anyway). But ARMA =/= HEMA (as in the community entire) by a damn sight.

Oh? Tell me more--I'd assumed that ARMA culture was more or less it outside of SCA, and I'd more or less given up on getting involved as I got older and my tolerance for pissing contests dropped substantially. But if there's other pockets of community, that might be different...
posted by sciatrix at 6:13 PM on October 29, 2015

Tangentially related, a friend sent me a link to this huge gallery of very fine looking weapons.
posted by ob1quixote at 8:45 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd assumed that ARMA culture was more or less it outside of SCA, and I'd more or less given up on getting involved as I got older and my tolerance for pissing contests dropped substantially. But if there's other pockets of community, that might be different.

ARMA has a special reputation in the North American HEMA world, as does the man who started it.

My experience has almost overwhelmingly been a very welcoming and positive one. People are glad you're there and glad to help you learn and discuss and test ideas, and "pissing contest" does not enter into it. As in just about any athletic endeavor, there is some degree of macho bullshit, but in my experience it's the exception rather than the rule. There can be a high number of awkward people, as it tends to attract a certain kind of introverted dork that other, more recently traditional forms of athletics do not attract.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:58 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is going to be a fascinating case study in "The Invention of Tradition", per Hobsbawm and others (PDF). I'm sure it's a blast and has some basis in some reality but it reeks of a totalized pastiche, a bricolage of historical flotsam reified by romantics.
posted by Rumple at 11:26 AM on October 30, 2015

I don't think that's fair at all. Nobody (that I know of) is under the illusion that they are doing things exactly how they were done in the past. In fact, this very thing is addressed quite baldly in the first 20 minutes of the documentary. Did you even watch it? We are all aware that we are attempting to reconstruct things that have been dead for a long time and have no living tradition, and that doing so often entails inserting things from other traditions in a Jurassic Park-esque way. To be politic but blunt, I think that was a potshot by someone without any experience in the thing they are deriding.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:50 AM on October 30, 2015

it reeks of a totalized pastiche, a bricolage of historical flotsam reified by romantics.

I think that's laying it on a bit thick. Multiple people in the documentary address this question at some length; the sources studied span centuries and multiple countries and one person (I think it's Jake Norwood) points out the apples-and-oranges scenario of a person using a 15th century style weapon and fighting style against a person using an 18th century style weapon and style from an entirely different country. This was also partly to illustrate why most HEMA practitioners, at least the ones featured in this film, seem to shy away from period dress. But even more to the point is the acknowledgement that for a swordfighting style that died out a couple hundred years ago, of course you have to take it on faith that whoever wrote these old manuals knew what the hell they were talking about in the first place, and that the closest you can get to doing it "correctly" or "authentically" is to read the instructions, look at the diagrams, and try them over and over until the technique seems to make sense when put into practice. It's also mentioned that a lot of clubs may focus on a specific text; The tension over tournaments centers around the fact that if it becomes a sport organized enough to have well-defined rules based on one specific style of fighting, or rules from one particular dueling manual, then the study of the other ones is going to fall by the wayside. The impression I got from watching this is that HEMA enthusiasts are aware that this is a reconstruction, and that they are also wary of turning it into a Ren-faire pastiche.

That whole aspect of HEMA - resurrecting a living art from printed artifacts, and trying to find a modern context for it, resonates quite strongly with me because it's a pretty good parallel for the 19th century banjo style I've been studying and playing for the last 5-6 years; the stroke style of banjo playing featured in early minstrel shows had fallen out of favor before audio recording technology came along, and it wasn't until Bob Winans' academic work on the subject in the 1970s that anyone thought to revisit that earlier music and figure out what it sounded like. As it turns out there are a number of banjo instruction books from 1855 onward that describe pretty thoroughly how the instrument was played, and contain arrangements of very popular tunes of the time period (as well as smaller study-type pieces.) In the last 10 years or so there's been a small but enthusiastic revival that struggles with the same questions of "authenticity" in addition to the terrible legacy of racism and appropriation entwined with the music.

Within the early banjo community it is a given that when we talk about "minstrel style banjo playing", we mean "minstrel style banjo playing as best as we can agree that it was played, as learned by following the written instructions in the old tutor books without the benefit of actual audio or video of Joel Sweeney or Frank Converse themselves playing it." You inevitably get people who come along and say "but how can you be suuuuuure that's what the way it was played, hmmmmm?" and past a certain point there's not much else you can point to beyond the thorough instructions describing the mechanics of the style (very similar to modern clawhammer banjo) and the standard musical notation that has been transcribed by the author into standard musical notation, often with fingering and fretboard position; all of the information is there: what notes to play, how long to play them, where on the fingerboard to play them, and the description of the various right-hand techniques used to play them, and challenge them to put it altogether and come up with something that sounds any different.

There is also a similar tension about period dress as it relates to studying and playing the old music, because (as with HEMA) people find their way to it by various paths; academics are interested in the research and the artifacts, but there's a pretty strong living history/reenactment contingent too thanks to overlap of the time period with the American Civil War.

The living history aspect was a big draw for me early on, but I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with it because it is easy to do poorly, and short of trying to recreate actual blackface minstrel shows it's a bit iffy to claim historical accuracy by just playing in period clothes anyway; very few civil soldiers would have actually had instruments in camp, because that's one more thing they would have had to carry on the march. And it wasn't an instrument for polite society at the time, so you wouldn't have been all that likely to see a random white person out and about playing a banjo either. So, I really appreciate the way those things were discussed in the documentary, and like that it's acknowledged that HEMA is a best effort at a revival based on study of the sources, mostly(?) divorced from people who just want to dress up and play Game of Thrones.
posted by usonian at 1:40 PM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

usonian said it much better than I did, and I don't find anything to disagree with in his comment.

It's interesting to me, too, usonian to hear you talk about the uncomfortable aspects of this kind of reconstruction, re: history. As an extraordinarily (by most standards, anyway) left-leaning person, I am sometimes made uncomfortable by the fact that I am in most cases studying the arts of the oppressor. Samantha Swords touches on this a bit in the documentary, when she mentioned how these things were originally practiced by people "quite high up on the food chain". Many of the texts extol the usefulness of the art of arms in many contexts, and I believe at least one of them lists riot suppression (and as another comment in another thread observed, oftentimes riots were the only semi-legitimate mode of political expression for pre-modern people) among them.

This is just one of many reasons I am interested in stick arts. Contra Roberto Laura's no doubt excellent book, for my money the stick is truly the Sword of the People.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:02 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]