Two major projects will be launched in 2025: a new codicological database of German fight books, and a collaboration with the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg) to produce video interpretations of the famous manuscript 3227a as part of a crowd-sourced ‘Interpretathon’.

Weapon: All

Source: All of them

Academic studies of fight books and European martial arts have skyrocketed in the last 10 years. As part of this development, a detailed codicological handbook has been developed by Rainer Welle (to be published in 2025), including revised datings and hands-on codicological autopsies of every German fight book known to date (and some previously unknown fragments as well). The data in this handbook is so rich and so important for scholarly study, but also for the HEMA community, that it needs to be transformed into a digital tool designed to answer concrete research questions. Over the past three years, I have been developing such a tool, which will be online in the course of 2025 and the features of which I will present in this talk. In addition, I have secured funding for a project in collaboration with the Germanisches Nationalmuseum that will invite the HEMA community to focus on a particular passage of the oldest surviving Liechtenauer source, manuscript 3227a, in order to produce video interpretations that will enhance the understanding of this complex source for non-practitioners (i.e. “regular”, non-fencing historians), thus bridging the gap between scholarly discourse and embodied experimentation in the HEMA community.

Skill level of Participants: Any skill level
Needed Equipment: Again: coffee

About the trainer – Eric Burkart

I have a Ph.D. in medieval history from Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2015) and have been working with fight books since 2013. I am currently writing my second book (habilitation) on medieval martial arts as the Principal Investigator of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (“The Textualisation of Martial Arts – Fighting Practices as Objects of Knowledge within the Fight Book Corpus [14th-16th Century]”, Trier University).

I am also building a codicological database on fight books, which will be published as open access in summer 2025.

My follow-up project as Principal Investigator will involve the HEMA community: “Embodied Interpretathon – Crowdbasierte Interpretation von mittelalterlichen Bewegungsbeschreibungen” starting in June 2025 in collaboration with the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg and funded by the NFDI consortium 4memory.

Practical training: I have been training continuously in various martial arts since 1989 (Olympic fencing, karate, jiu-jitsu, wing chun, competitive shooting, Kali, Muay Thai). In 2007 I also started HEMA with a focus on Liechtenauer long sword and sword and buckler, but I am not affiliated with any club or institution.

I like tyre hitting and people who love fighting but hate violence (https://lfhv.org/).