What is HEMA?

HEMA stands for Historical European Martial Arts - This is used to refer to any of a variety of armed and unarmed fighting disciplines from throughout Europe's history.

Historical Martial Arts are a different kind of study from living traditions - they notably are reconstructions based on surviving source material. Depending on the art being reconstructed, different approaches may be used depending on the available source material. For example, there's no strict, clear documentation of how migration-era scandinavian peoples fought, yet there are HEMA groups that reconstruct viking-age combat based on descriptions of combat from the Sagas, period artwork, and close study of surviving historical weaponry. Typically as one moves forward in time it is easier to find documentation of fighting techniques for a variety of weapons, with the surviving corpus of literature notably becoming accessible starting in the 15th century (with a couple of exceptions from the 14th century) and expanding as we approach the modern era.

One of the strengths of HEMA is that no two schools or clubs function exactly the same - each group has their own focus on time period, weapon, source material, and approach to training. This means that as long as we keep an open mind, we can stand to learn a lot from eachother whether we're studying 15th century two-handed sword play, 17th century rapier, early modern cane fighting, pugilism and wrestling, or any other discipline.