The importance of original depictions in HEMA.
On every martial art I’ve practice, I’ve seen the same discusion again and again: practicity vs tradition. One side argues that we train in order to perform well on combat, and that is accomplished by the fastest and simplest moves. The ones that you can master and perform quickly. This school of though is also quite competition-prone. In comparishon, the more traditional way of training, focusing on mimicking the original techniques from old, think that the art is in performing complex moves that requiere lots of training and effort to master. This school is, as you can guess, more academic-prone that the first one.
Both points of view have its advantages, and each practitioner can (and have) to choose which path is he/she willing to make, and to which extent. So, why are depictions and drawings so important for HEMA practice?
HEMA is different than most martial arts since it works with dead styles. Almost everything we do was deprecated and abandoned, so we have to perform, even if unwillingly, some degree of academical research while training.
This means that we have to base our techniques on (sometimes cryptic) descriptions and depictictions from original treatises. This may seem obvious to most, but it creates a serious conflict when people from the above discussed “practic” school aproaches HEMA, as their way of training is reductionistic. This aproach, from my experience, leads practitioners to ignore some aspects of the treatise, considered too complicated or just some artistic licence by the artist, weakening their technique, which ends with them thinking that the whole technique, or even the style is not useful at all.
But they are undesrtanding it wrong. The technique is not weak, they are taking it’s strengths from it. Publishing a book was really expensive back then, and wook carvings or drawings made it even more expensive. So, if the master decided to invest on some fancy drawings with weird postures, don’t ignore them!
As a Meyer’s longsword practitioner, I see this frequently. This particular author has quite low stances and a particular way of moving, and even if his style is quite popular nowadays, it’s really hard to find modern material working with the techniques he depicted on any of his treatises. You can find lots of people working Meyer’s techniques on confortable, balanced stances, while they should be using lower, wider stances instead.
Is this a bad thing? It depends. But as a teacher I’m weary. You can train into the traditional forms, and afterward develop an “application focused” version of the style, but you can’t just ignore the complicated parts of a style just because you don’t think they are useful nor practic. You may be ignoring the whole biomechanics that support the system you are using. That’s why Meyer’s legs are so wide spread, why Fabris stances are so low or why Carranza’s steps are so small: biomechanics. Each master had their preferences, and each style exploits some of our biomechanical characteristics while ignoring others. So please, don’t ignore the stances and guards depicted on the treatises.
