Academic – Martial – Education
Most fighters with some familiarity with German longsword know Meyer’s cutting diagram; even if their group turns their nose up at Meyer’s “sporting” style, they probably cut their teeth on the diagram. It’s a simple concept of interlocking rings, where…
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In Joachim Meyer’s sequence of devices, the principles of hanging and winding are introduced in the second device using the guard of Zornhut (1.34v and 1.35r; Figure 1), immediately after a device dealing with the slice (referred to in my…
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My article about the Kron, or Crown, guard a few months ago (read it here) caused quite a stir, with a lot of discussion about whether I was right about the Kron being a horizontal guard above the head, sometimes…
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In previous installments of the Meyer Masterclass series, I’ve dealt with Meyer’s longsword devices in roughly the same sequence as he presents them. We dealt with the first three devices which lay the basis for parrying and counterattacking, the Fourth…
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My previous article, “Some observations on women, tournaments and heavy-hitting” cause quite a stir a few months back. While lots of people liked my comments, some argued that what they did was not “heavy hitting”, and some argued that such…
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The devices in Meyer’s longsword introduce different techniques sequentially to the student,and often introduce the same technique in a variety of contexts. One such technique is a beat with crossed hands from the left, which is introduced and displayed in…
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In Joachim Meyer’s comprehensive longsword treatise, the second section of the book is devoted to a set of “devices” which I believe represent a teaching syllabus, designed to introduce different techniques in sequence to the student. In this section, the…
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An issue that comes up every so often when dealing with Meyer’s longsword is “stance”- how wide should you be? This is a contentious issue, with different groups advocating a permanently wide stance, or a variably wide stance. At the…
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Anatomy of Interpretation: The Kron or Crown Additional translation provided by Jack Gassman We often tend to forget that HEMA is actually an oral tradition in many respects. Despite the hard work put into translating and understanding the manuals, the…
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It still surprises me how few people in modern HEMA know how far we’ve come in the last 15 years. From a small group of scattered researchers across the globe, to a vibrant growing community today, the change has been…
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