Weapons · Sources & steel
HEMA
Historical European martial arts: reconstruct the fight from treatises, then test it with steel or feder.
Find a topic
A map of this art. Live entries are links. The rest is mapped, not written yet.
What Is HEMA?
Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) is a modern research-and-practice movement. People read fight books — Fiore dei Liberi, the Liechtenauer tradition, later sabre and smallsword manuals — and then try to make the techniques work in drills and in tournaments.
Gear ranges from nylon to feder (a flexible training longsword) to blunt steel. Rulesets are still being argued in public, which is healthy. This hub is the catalog door, not a single club’s interpretation.
How HEMA Works
A typical longsword hour: footwork, guards (Pflug, Ochs, and so on in the German vocabulary), cuts, thrusts, windings, and grappling at the sword. Sources disagree. Clubs pick a tradition and a pressure-test culture.
Olympic fencing is a cousin sport with a different weapon and a finished modern rulebook. Kendo is a living Japanese budō. HEMA’s claim is the manuscript plus the bout.
Books, then bruises
The nineteenth century almost lost these systems as living practice. The late-twentieth-century reconstruction is the art you can join now. Treat “medieval” marketing with the same skepticism we use on any other style poster.
What You’ll Find Here
This hub is the live overview. Published entries are links. Fighters, gyms, rules, and news are mapped for later — even when those pages are not written yet.
FAQ
Questions we hear on the mats, in gyms, and when fighters compare styles.
Is HEMA just European kendo?
No. Different sources, weapons, and scoring cultures. Both hit people with training swords. That is the overlap, not the identity.
Do I need to read medieval German?
Helpful in a Liechtenauer club. Not a prerequisite for a good beginner class. The source still sits behind the syllabus.
Steel or nylon?
Beginners often start lighter. Tournaments specify. The art is the interpretation, not the shopping list.
The Bottom Line
HEMA reconstructs European fighting from books and then tests it. Pair it with fencing for the Olympic descendant and kendo for a living East Asian sword sport.