Historical Pedagogy

Teaching History Through the Sword

By HILT Official · Dec 20, 2025 · 9 min read

HEMA is as much a research discipline as an athletic one. How to make the historical sources central to your teaching.

The Text Is the Master This is the phrase you hear repeated in HEMA circles, and it's worth taking seriously. Unlike Asian martial arts, where technique is transmitted through a living lineage of teacher to student over centuries, European martial arts have a gap. The lineage broke. What survived are the books: manuscripts written by fencing masters between the 13th and 17th centuries, describing their fighting systems in text and illustrations. This means every HEMA technique is, at some level, an interpretation. Two instructors can read the same passage from Fiore and teach it differently.…

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Constraint-Led Training for HEMA Stop telling students what to do. Start designing drills that make the right technique the obvious choice.
The Meyer Square: Teaching Cuts Through Geometry Joachim Meyer's cutting diagram is 450 years old and still one of the best tools for teaching edge alignment.
Video Review as a Coaching Tool Your students don't know what they look like when they fence. Show them.

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