👻 Are you terrified of the texts? Do they fill you with despair and horror? Well don’t fear, I’m going to give you some top tricks to take away the terror and treat yourself to some inside knowledge.

🪶 Fight books are written in a different time, and in a different language. In order to reach you and be understood they need to go through several processes first.

The lens of translation 🔍

🗣️ The translator or transcriber will have their own bias and understanding of the language and context. They will have included (or not) all the things they consider to be important.

🧑‍🏫 If you are learning all your historical fencing from a teacher you are viewing it through their understanding and experience. There’s nothing wrong with this, instructors are doing an amazing job bringing HEMA to new audiences.

📕 However to gain a deeper understanding of what you are training, it helps to look at the sources yourself, to see how you understand and interpret their meaning. Again this will all be viewed through the lens of your own experience and understanding.

🤿 Diving into the texts

🍒 You can cherry pick what you want to look at. Don’t feel you need to have fully read and understood an entire manual cover to cover in order to gain insights. Interpretation can be hard work, so don’t be afraid or ashamed to pick a weapon or style or technique that you want to home in on. Simply taking a single phrase or action can take you down a whole rabbit warren of investigation, experimentation and study.

🚁 You can also take the helicopter view of a book. Read the chapter headings to see what’s covered; flick through the images to see what’s repeated, and what changes; scan a page to see what words come up a lot, and what is conspicuously absent. This will give you an idea of what the author considers to be important, and what is implicit.

🔬 You can compare what several masters say on a topic, and what they don’t say. This can give a contextual view for a period, or how something changes over time.

👀 Stay curious, dig deep, and have fun!