Rassemblement and Counter: Favorite Épée drills at Joinville-le-Pont

Taking the proper starting distance: Heels together, arms extended, tips touching.

While foils and sabers dominate the pictorial treasure trove contained in the souvenir postcards sent from the French military collector at Joinville-le-Pont, épées start to appear in the first years of the 20th century….

25 years of Secret Sword History! (Actually, make that 30…)

Just when you thought there couldn’t be anything less interesting than endless Star Wars regressions, here comes The SHotS Origin Story...

Ancient Modern Épée Skills

Setting up a distance trap for fun and profit.

Deadly duel: How Count Rudolph Christian put his eye out!

One aspect of historical swordsmanship neglected by modern martialist is that probably the majority of fights involved drunk young men and were over quickly. On occasion, like here, a blade would be permanently bent inside of an opponent’s skull… perhaps a timely reminder for HEMA practitioners to supplement their halter tops and yoga pants with a decent mask, even for practice and posing…

Der Renommist—The Show-Off

Bootleg Kreusslerian instruction backfires

The Dead Boy in the Woods

Reconstructing a Deadly Duel from 1841

—by J. Christoph Amberger

Some went to Rathsberg near Erlangen for the wholesome air. Others came to die...

We don’t know why the kid brother of a dead revolutionary ended up with a half foot of steel in his chest, but we think we’ve figured out how.

The Dirty Half-Dozen

How a Livonian at Marburg took on six opponents at the same time until the rector broke up the fight…

Eberhard Werner Happel’s 1690 novel, Der Academische Roman, recounts the adventures of a group of stock characters representing the predominant tempers of contemporary students. There is the perma-horny lover boy, the drunkard, the pedantic leearned man of great ambition and meager purse. Obviously, the most likable one for our purposes is Klingenfeld, the swordsman of the group. A veteran of 58 scraps just at the four German universities he attended, not to mention several encounters during their journey, he also is a fountain of battle stories…

Dueling in the French Foreign Legion, 1831

The following passage is from the reminiscences of the German writer August Jäger (also called von Schlumb). Jäger’s claim to fame is the 1835 novel Felix Schnabel oder Der deutsche Student—the semi-autobiographic tale of an aimless, drifting German fraternity student, who duels and drinks his way through many a university city, and, having failed his exams, sees his only perspective in “becoming an infantryman in the Greek Army” (where, at the time, a not inconsiderable number of German ne’er-do-wells were assisting the rebel cause)…

Trick Shot: A two-handed thrust backwards into the thigh from the 1630’s

Some modern martialists spend so much time arguing what the martially-minded duelist of yesteryear would have never done, it would seem that European Martial Arts, especially of the 17th and 18th centuries, was something for ultra-cautious, risk-adverse middle-aged veterans wearing leather soles on a freshly waxed floor while carrying a stack of Wedgwood china. And yet, period literature yields interesting indications that things were not what they seem…

Big Bang Theory, 1566: The Nerd with the Golden Nose

Maybe Cousin Manderup was “in his spot”. Maybe it was Fermat’s Next-to-Last Theorem proving that 2 + 2 = 5 ? Fact is that a squabble among freshman nerds at the theology professor’s house ended in an ugly injury that made one of the geeks almost as famous for his rhinoplasty as for his scientific discoveries…