Episode 209: Medieval European Body Culture, with Dr Maciej Talaga
Share
PODBEAN - APPLE - SPOTIFY
Dr Maciej Talaga is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. His research interests have revolved around premodern European martial traditions, with particular focus on late medieval, Central European and the so-called German School of fighting. His goal is to elevate HEMA studies into a legitimate field of research within academic history and archaeology.
Maciej is a member of HEMAtac, a HEMA coaching organization, and is a qualified Olympic fencing instructor in the Polish Fencing Association. He also runs the Sprechfenster blog on Patreon. Guy first came across Maciej’s work through his article Probing the Depth of Medieval European Body Culture: Preliminary Research on Methods of Physical Training, 1250 to 1500.
We talk about how Maciej got into historical martial arts, and a bit of background of the development of the HEMA scene in Poland. Both Maciej and Guy have experience of sport fencing, and we talk about how sport fencing coaching techniques can be beneficial in training historical fencing, giving you a framework for understanding concepts in historical fencing.
Maciej sees HEMA as a grand project, with tournaments having a key place within this project. We discuss the benefits of the competitive environment, how it affects your training, and how it reveals the differences between what’s in the fight books and how we practice sword fighting today. Guy talks himself into getting back into tournament fencing – for seniors only, mind you.
We also discuss the topic of Maciej’s article about medieval European body culture. What sports did people do, how did they train? What sources do we have to prove what people did?
Links of interest:
HEMAtac: https://hematacticalanalys.wixsite.com/hematac
Maciej’s Sprechfenster blog: https://www.patreon.com/sprechfenster
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I'm here today with Dr Maciej Talaga, who is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. His research interests have revolved around premodern European martial traditions, with particular focus on late medieval, Central European and the so-called German School of fighting. Having initially approached the topic from a purely archaeological perspective, he gradually adopted a performative approach, combining text and artifact-based studies with practical experimentation. And can you tell that I've copied and pasted lots of this from official bios somewhere? Because that's part of what I do. Okay. He is a founder of HEMAtac, a HEMA coaching organization, and is a qualified Olympic fencing instructor in the Polish Fencing Association too. He also runs the Sprechfenster blog on Patreon. I first came across his work when Roland Warzecha pointed me towards his article Probing the Depth of Medieval European Body Culture: Preliminary Research on Methods of Physical Training, 1250 to 1500 in Cogent Arts and Humanities, which is an academic journal, so plenty to talk about, and without further ado, Maciej, welcome to the show.
Maciej Talaga
Hello, everybody. Pleasure to be here.
Guy Windsor
Just, yeah, nice to meet you.
Maciej Talaga
By the way, by the way, yeah, I forgot to ask you, is it guy or guy? How do you pronounce your name?
Guy Windsor
Guy. The English and the Americans pronounce it Guy, the French pronounce it Guy. Yeah, fair question. And actually, you are the very first guest to ask me that question. And it's about time somebody did. I’m sure you’re not the first person to think it. Whereabouts in the world are you? Are you in Warsaw at the moment?
Maciej Talaga
Well, near Warsaw, because I live in a village that's pretty close to the city, but it's not part of Warsaw, actually. And of course, it's Poland. So this is where I'm based.
Guy Windsor
Excellent, yeah, because one of the things we do on the show is we try to get people from lots of different places, and I think you're our second Pole. I'll have to look that up. So excellent.
Maciej Talaga
You interviewed Przemysław Grabowski-Górniak.
Guy Windsor
You can pronounce his name correctly, which is amazing, I tried so hard.
Maciej Talaga
It’s like I was a native Polish speaker,
Guy Windsor
Almost. You’ve been practicing your whole life. Okay, so how did you get into historical martial arts?
Maciej Talaga
Well, I think it might be a quite typical story, because late in my high school years, I ended up in a reenactment group that was, well, reenacting the Middle Ages, broadly speaking, but mostly the period around the Battle of Grunwald, which was a major battle fought between the Teutonic Order and forces of the Polish Lithuanian alliance that later became the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. So it was the beginning of the 15th century, but there, the group was generally focused as most reenactment groups those days on material culture. So they were sewing their clothes, preparing their personas, this kind of stuff. I found it rather boring at the time. But they also had sword trainings. This was the part that I was interested in the most. But these practices were, well, not really regular, quite infrequent. And they were also tailored towards pseudo armoured combat, which was like an unholy alliance of armoured fighting, and striking places that would be entirely unreasonable to strike in an armoured fight.
Guy Windsor
It's funny because reenactment groups generally, the one bit they have to get wrong is the fighting, because otherwise everyone on the field would be at risk of getting killed. But they could be so pernickety about are your hose hand stitched or did somebody use the sewing machine, and yet then they use a poleaxe or a sword or something in just completely the wrong way. And you can see why, but it's exactly the same reason why I did reenactment for a bit in the 90s and then just gave it up because it's just not my thing.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, so at one point, well, the leaders of our group, Łukasz Cichy and Radosław Ciszewski, the latter now he's better known nowadays as Radosław the Armourer, became one of the most prominent armour makers, at least in Europe. So then I found out that there is the thing called ARMA and has a study group in Warsaw. And this, the study group was just being established at the time, and it was 2007 by Bartłomiej Walczak, also more widely known as Bart.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I know, I know Bart. And yeah, he was, he was sort of one of the founders of historical martial arts in Poland, but for sure he was doing stuff a lot earlier than 2007.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, of course. But it was complicated because he was based in Krakow first. Okay, so Warsaw actually near Warsaw, and he was opening the Warsaw study group. So our reenactment group leaders found out about this, and they decided it's so cool that we will just sort of transfer all our sword trainings to this group. So we, like, collectively, moved there, those of us who wanted to train sword fighting. So I ended up there, and because this was the actual stuff I was interested in, I gradually faded out of the enactment group and became, became an ARMA member training there. So this is how it started. But then, of course, there is a long story after.
Guy Windsor
Are you still involved with ARMA?
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, because it's also a complicated history, because at one point, ARMA Poland, as we are called, broke with the US ARMA.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I smell some juicy gossip.
Maciej Talaga
I think it's already quite well known in the global HEMA community, especially in some circles, because it was a major, major upset.
Guy Windsor
I had no idea. I just don't pay any attention to sword politics that I don't have to pay attention to. But you're involved in one of the groups that’s directly involved in the thing. So, fair enough.
Maciej Talaga
We are now entirely separate. But we do not reject our legacy as part of the ARMA. We also owe a lot to our ARMA teachers, including John Clements, but at some point we just broke. Broke ways. This is how you say it, in English?
Guy Windsor
Yes, parted ways.
Maciej Talaga
Quite well, in a violent way, actually, because at one point…
Guy Windsor
Honestly, with John is anything not violent?
Maciej Talaga
Well, I mean, depends on your definition. Yeah, he is certainly quite energetic, that's for sure. And quite opinionated, or he's got strong opinions on stuff, and doesn't take opposition very well. So at one point, he issued an official challenge to a duel to our then leader. Christoph, who was the ARMA leader at the time, and he was the addressee of this challenge, he responded like, okay, let's do it. And then a lot of people from Poland, including me, sort of subscribed to this, and we just decided, okay, let's do it. We also want to fight John Clements. If he wants a duel, he can have a couple. And we even arranged for plane tickets to get him to Poland to do the thing. But then he sort of ghosted us, and it never happened.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I wonder why? What could possibly go wrong for him if he shows up in Poland full of piss and vinegar and wants to fight people. I mean, no, that makes no sense.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, okay, long story short.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so how does sport fencing figure into your training?
Maciej Talaga
Okay, that's a layered question, because, well, in order to answer it, I must start with something else a little bit. After I started training under Bart, it coincided with me starting my Archaeology studies at the University of Warsaw, and when I was approaching the time when I was supposed to write my bachelor's thesis, I started to search for something that I could do that would combine Hema and archaeology. I failed. But during the process, I asked Bart about something that I could potentially research, that wasn't research all that well at the time. And he pointed me to what's what was then known as the Döbringer Codex, but which is now more correctly known as Manuscript 3227a, or Pol Hausbuch. So I got involved in this manuscript and, well, trying to understand it, I quickly realized that although it's packed with knowledge, it also has important gaps. And I started thinking that perhaps I could gain some tacit knowledge that is missing from the description that I do not possess myself by starting to train under a competent fencing master. So in 2012 I started attending epee classes in Warsaw. And this is how it started.
Guy Windsor
That’s interesting to me. I came from a sport fencing background, foil and sabre. So when I started doing historical martial arts, 1993 or something, I'd already been fencing for like, six or seven years, and reasonably well, like I was on the University team. I wasn't particularly good, but that sort of level of experience, and in terms of training methodology and pedagogy, the sport fencing stuff was extremely useful. In terms of specific actions, techniques and fencing theory, it was a massive sidetrack. That's as I found it to be. How did you find it as a way of making these sources more accessible?
Maciej Talaga
First of all, it's very tempting, because it's a coherent system that works when you encounter it. You quickly realise that you could actually transplant a lot of it directly to your fighting with good results. But if you use a more critical research lens to your HEMA practice, or a research perspective, then you also quickly realise that although you can create a viable fencing system based on a pretty liberal mixture of what you find in fight books and what you learn at the fencing hall, modern fencing hall. This is problematic, because it's easy to start being anachronistic in your depiction of the past fencing. So that's one thing that became obvious to me pretty quickly, and I think it's now generally understood in the community. Sorry. Give me a second. My cat is scratching the door.
Sorry, she always does it when I’m here doing stuff on the computer. Probably I'll have to let her out sometime in the future. Anyway, yeah, so that's one thing, and I think it's already well known in the HEMA community that you have this problem. But I agree that the common mistake that people usually do early on as they try to engage Olympic fencing is to try to transplant complete solutions, like particular motions. What we would call techniques. This is an easy way to enhance the efficiency of their fencing, but it's a tricky path in terms of trying to understand the past or reconstruct historical fencing. But then again, it's complicated because especially if you are like me, that is, you started Olympic fencing because of your interest in historical fencing, and not the other way around, then the fencing tactics, the theory and the concepts they embody are complicated. They are not easy to grasp, actually. And trying to first primitively and naively transplant certain technical solutions from Olympic fencing to historical fencing can actually be beneficial, in a way, because this way you can embody these techniques, and the techniques, in turn, embody the broader principles and concepts. It's, of course, in a way, it’s a side track, because then you realise that, of course, it's not historical fencing that you're doing now, you're doing something else, but if you see it as a part of your learning curve, it can be beneficial . And also, after you start approaching this critically later on, this comparison between what you ended up doing after you just transplanted these modern solutions, when you compare this to what's written in the source, this difference can also be informative, because it actually can reveal, or shed light on the real differences between the historical systems and the modern system, or systems. There's no one Olympic fencing actually.
Guy Windsor
I mean, one thing I find really useful from like modern sport fencing is very clearly defined terms like attack, defence, parry, riposte, counter, attack, feint, feint in time, all that sort of thing, so you have ways of classifying actions as they're done against the opponent in a way that doesn't necessarily reflect what somebody in the 15th century is writing in a book. But if you look at what's happening in any of these treatises, there are things which are which clearly fall under the modern definition of attack, things that clearly follow the modern definition of parry and riposte, things that clearly follow a modern definition of counterattack. And so having those concepts clearly defined allows you to sort of describe the phrase of the actions. This person is doing this, this person is doing that, this other person is responding like this and so on. And it gives you a way of formalising that, which makes it much easier to sort of lay it out in a drill, or describe the difference between, okay, if you do a Zornhau, for example, and if you do it in one motion, so your point is up in their face, we'd call that a counterattack. If you do it in two motions, where that first Zornhau is basically just a parry, and then you stab them in the face, we'd call that a parry riposte. And that distinction may not be there in the text, but students will do it one of those two ways, and for various reasons, you might want them to do one or the other. And this way you can describe the difference between them with just a couple of very specific terms, as opposed to having to explain what it is from the fundamentals every time.
Maciej Talaga
That's true, that's true. Also there's differences these conceptual categories that the Olympic fencing has, they are also useful because they contain certain important knowledge about principles that travel well across time and space, like, for instance, if you're doing a counterattack, then your counterattack cannot simultaneously be parry riposte. These are two distinct entities. And so forth. So you can better understand that you know certain interpretations that you could possibly produce based on fight books or general historical sources, some interpretations are mutually exclusive for instance. You can't have a cookie and eat a cookie. And this framework actually helps understand that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and for me, the most useful thing that sport fencing did is in 2010 I went on a fencing coach’s course, and it really kind of cracked open for me how I should be teaching historical martial arts. Because in sport fencing, you have a very clear idea of the real thing, which is a proper tournament, with clearly defined rule sets, clearly defined equipment. All the rules are clear. You know exactly what it's going to be like. You have a clearly defined set of theoretical and practical knowledge that you're supposed to be doing when you're there, and you have a system that's been worked out for over 100 years on how to train someone in that system to perform in that environment. And okay, the environment's changed a bit, but it's been pretty stable for the last 40 years at least. So people are now very, very good at taking someone who doesn't know how to do this through this body of theoretical and practical knowledge to be applied in this specific circumstance, and develop the skill and the knowledge to do well in that particular tournament environment. It's fabulous. We have a different set of theoretical and practical knowledge and a different intended environment, but the process of developing skill and knowledge for a specific environment is the same. Honestly, it transformed the way I teach, and my students have benefited from it enormously.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, I can see that. I also developed as a teacher immensely. Through my blog, one of the things I have always tried to do is to champion the framework of individual lesson, or what some people call the plastron lesson. The latter is not a very precise term. I don't like it.
Guy Windsor
I usually don't wear a plastron when I'm teaching.
Maciej Talaga
Me neither. So there you go. This way it becomes entirely missed. But the individual lesson is also a powerful tool that can be you don't have to copy slavishly what they do in like an epee lesson or a sabre lesson, but the pedagogical principles that they developed are the same and can be transferred without harm to the historical aspect of what we're doing, with some thinking of course.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, sure. It's the initial effect I found when I started applying that more kind of sport fencing, individual lesson coaching approach when I was giving individual lessons is I ended up getting hit too hard too often. Because we hadn't yet figured out how to adapt that. Because, of course, in sport fencing, you can be hit 50, 60, 100 times in the chest with a foil and you're wearing the coach's plastron, and it doesn't matter, you're not even sore afterwards. You can't get hit 50 or 60 times with a longsword no matter what you're wearing without feeling it later. Unless you moderate force considerably. So, yeah, we did have to modify some things considerably to make it work,
Maciej Talaga
And the drive towards lighter feders is part of the process, I think.
Guy Windsor
Although I hate those with a passion.
Maciej Talaga
It's controversial, to say the least, but still, on the practical side of things it's very, very nice, because you can absorb quite a lot of thrusts with bendy feder, which is not always the case with a stiffer blade, not to mention absorbing cuts. And as you said, when you're giving individual lessons in HEMA, especially with heavier weapons, like the longsword or certain types of sabres, then you need to modify the technique that epee coaches are using, or Olympic sabre coaches are using, because you need to accommodate the weight and the impact of these weapons. So you can't just apishly copy what they do.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, you have to translate it.
Maciej Talaga
That's right. It's a translation rather than copy, yeah.
Guy Windsor
Now it's sort of become almost a trope that what we see in sort of modern longsword tournaments is basically a combination of epee and kendo. You see a lot more epee and a lot more kendo than you see Liechtenauer or Fiore, generally speaking. Because epee and kendo are adapted to work in that same environment. You're padded up and you're trying to hit each other that's something quite long.
Maciej Talaga
But I also think it's also a matter of, you know what people expect to see. I mean, within the historical traditions we have like what can we call signature moves that everyone recognizes as part of this or that tradition. Because the HEMA systems, they are not homogenous. There's extreme diversity in the sources. It's the tensions between these diverse systems is also palpable in many places. You take the manuscript 3227A with which I worked a lot, and you have this famous rant against false masters, which he calls Reichmeister. So, there was one fencing, there was another fencing. You take the writings of Jacopo Monesi two centuries, or maybe three centuries later. And you know, there is a rant against Italian fencing masters over theorizing fencing, instead of just focusing on four straight cuts, and proper footing.
Guy Windsor
Like Silver in 1599.
Maciej Talaga
There are many examples of this. So what I was trying to say is that there are systems out there in our historical sources that were perhaps more focused on the very essentials. And there were those with more emphasized signature repertoires, with added aesthetic value, for instance, or with certain characteristics. So I think it's an easy take to say that we don't see much HEMA in modern tournaments. But what I think it actually means is that we don't see much signature moves. But we may be seeing actually, quite a lot of those simpler systems, or less, I don't like the word flashy, but I'll use it as a shorthand. So perhaps we're not seeing a lot of this flashy stuff, but we see a lot of the essentials, especially from some systems. That's, that's my point of view on this.
Guy Windsor
The thing where it’s most obvious to me is that most of the footwork you see is basically sport fencing footwork. One foot stage in front the whole time, and people are going forwards and back. And that is not how it's described. I mean, Fiore has the accrescere, and he uses it, but most of the time the technique will be done with a pass will be in there somewhere. There might be an accrescere as well. But there's usually a pass of some kind. Because Fiore very kindly describes the footwork in some detail. So, I mean, to my mind, I think the context in which people are fencing in a modern tournament is quite far removed from the context in which people were fencing even in a relatively similar sort of friendly tournament back in, shall we say, 1400 because, to my mind, the reason you'd enter a tournament back in 1400 as a knight or a squire would be to gain renown that would get you basically hired for your next gig. So you weren't competing for points, you were competing to show bravery, to show prowess, to show you're the kind of person that that Duke or Lord or whatever would want commanding a lance in a battle. So the sort of behaviour you would expect to see is different. It's going to be much less like rapier fencing, where it's traditionally, historically it's in private. It's illegal. It's about killing your opponent and not getting killed, or at least wounding them, and not getting not getting hit yourself. And so it's a lot more sort of straight back and forward. And think Capoferro rapier stuff, you the footwork is very like epee. Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that, but it's kind of technically true. Lots of lots of stepping forward, stepping back with the same foot forward, lots of lunges, the occasional linear pass, but that's it. So what we're seeing in a tournament now is because the point is to score a point and not get touched and win the tournament that way, and how impressive you are doing it isn't a factor. I think the incentives are completely different, so that may have something to do with it.
Maciej Talaga
I agree.
Guy Windsor
Oh, good.
Maciej Talaga
I do. I mean, because the role and the place of HEMA tournaments in the whole HEMA project, so to say, if we understand this project as a revival project, which is it's swooping. I mean, it's an extremely ambitious. This very broad project, the grandeur of which I think most HEMA people don't understand, actually.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, this has been my life for the last 24 years. I wouldn't do that if it wasn't a really big project. It is vast.
Maciej Talaga
Same here, but then again, the ambition, I think it escapes most people. And now, since it is such a broad and a large project, the role played by tournaments is anything but straightforward and simple. What I said before about that we are perhaps seeing more of historical systems in HEMA tournaments that we perhaps realize because of this aesthetic factor, I think it's true. But then again, it's also a fact that we usually see pieces of these systems in a disjointed manner. That is, for instance, we have fencers out there who can exhibit like real good command of this or that handwork from this or that system. We have rapier fencers who do Alfieri plays with ease on demanding opponents, when we look at their hands. But when you look at their footwork, not so much. Or the other way around. We have guys who move nicely on the feet, but ‘nicely’ meaning like in a historical way, but their hand work is something different, etc. So it's like a reconstruction distributed across a great number of individuals. So, in a way, not a single fencer, maybe uncritically present the system.
Guy Windsor
But I have fenced people who absolutely are 100% Capoferro, it's like fencing the book or 100% Fabris. It's like fencing the book. And honestly, that is bliss. It is just like you can literally point to the page of the thing that just hit you. Oh, you use plate 13 on me. Son of a bitch. It's immaculate. And it's amazing when you see it, when you're part of that. It's a fantastic feeling. And so it does exist, but again, that same person may then not be that much into the rest of the culture that's surrounding it, or the clothing or the that's another context.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, I agree. Well, what I wanted to say is that I said that perhaps no one can, uncritically represent the system. By which I mean that you know, I also know people whom I believe are able to represent a certain system, really accurately. But then again, I know other people well versed in in this or that system who believe that they are wrong in this or that aspect. So this is what I meant by uncritically. In HEMA we are really fond of finding flaws.
Guy Windsor
I've seen a colleague of mine's Capoferro class, and his students are lunging differently to the way my students lunge in one specific detail, and I can point to the exact bit of the book where we disagree what the word ‘turn’ is referring to. So it's like, we agree on so much. But there's this one little detail where he thinks it means this, I think it means that. And so my students lunge like this, and his students lunge like that, and it's fine, we're clearly doing the same thing. We're just coming to a slightly different conclusion in certain details, which is very satisfying. There's more than one way very often, to follow the text and look like the pictures. And it's probable that the author had in mind one specific way of doing the thing that follows the text and looks like the pictures. And it may be yours; it may be mine, but it may be something else altogether. And until he gets out of his grave and comes back and sorts us out with like, actually, no, it's like this, you can't really be certain in many cases. But as long as you can point to the bit in the book where you've read the same text and come up with a different solution, then we're all clearly doing the same thing. I really enjoyed those conversations. I recently had a multi hour conversation with Dario Alberto Magnani, known as Mr. Thokk, about one sentence, literally, one word in one sentence on a critical page of the Getty manuscript, and the son of a bitch was right, and now I've had to rejigger my interpretation of Fiore’s three turns of the sword, and it is, on the one hand, well, I literally the second iteration of that conversation was actually recorded as a podcast episode so people can hear the moment when I go, “Fuck you Dario”, because I've been teaching it that way for nearly 20 years, no, more than 20 years at that point, and ah, fuck no, he’s right. So, I mean, I think the modern tournament scene is extremely useful. I mean, it creates external validation for the people who need that. It creates a market for equipment manufacturers to make stuff for us to use. Like, I mean, back in the 90s, all we have was sport fencing equipment, which is completely shit when it comes to longswords. I have a scar on my head where a fencing mask failed. It wasn't strictly 100% the fencing mask’s fault. It was my fault for various reasons, but we're getting all sorts of equipment being produced, which some of it is really useful for historical research stuff. Loads of people will come to a tournament because they're interested in that. They like that competitive environment. I mean, there's a tournament running fairly locally to me recently, and I wandered along, and there must have been, I don't know, 130 people there, or something. And it's like, by historical martial arts standards, this is a huge event, and there are no classes, there's nothing. It's just people come and they compete in the tournament, and then they go home again. And it's like, honestly, if I really was business oriented, I would redirect my business interests to become something to do with tournament scene, because clearly people will pay money for it. They will travel for it. They will buy the equipment for it. It's super popular and I sort of see it as like a honey pot that brings in a lot of flies, and some of those will go actually, I'm not so keen on this, honey. I want to go do the historical stuff. That was a very mixed metaphor.
Maciej Talaga
That was a very driver of popularity of the whole thing, for sure. The thing I like about tournaments, and I know that not all people share this, but what I do like in them, is that they also create an environment which is competitive, while, of course, it is not the kind of competitiveness that we would see, let's say in medieval Nuremberg, or you name it. It's a different context. It's still a competitive place. And what it does, it, first of all, forces people to develop these tacit skills that underlie all fencing, or actually, all fighting practice. At some point it needs to be tested in some kind of competition. Doesn't have to be exactly what we do. But you need a competitive environment. So they create a competitive environment. That's one thing. By creating this competitive environment, they also create something that can, if you really start to think competitively about your fencing, even a strictly reconstructive historical fencing, when you make this mental decision, okay, I’m going to compete. I’m going to enter a tournament, let's say in six months or whatever, if you set this like tangible deadline, it colours your training very differently. Because when, when it's pure exploration, pure cultivation of your heritage, or whatever. It's all good, but it's just a different animal than training for competition. We see this in our sources as well. Well, you need to read between the lines a little. But if you take, for instance, Talhoffer and when he describes the procedure surrounding the judicial duel, and when he starts talking about how you prepare for this. One thing that he states is that in the run up to the judicial duel, that is these six weeks that he mentions, you should start training what he calls ‘strenuously’. And then he describes in greater detail what it means, like practicing twice a day, paying attention to your diet, this kind of stuff, also to your religious attitude, because who knows what factors decide the outcome in the end. So this shows that just like today, when an MMA fighter is about to fight on a fight card, they usually enter a training camp. And their whole life becomes restructured and geared towards this one goal. We see a very similar approach in Talhoffer when it comes to judicial duels. And since we won't hopefully, be using sharps to fight the people, kill them or maim them or wound them, then entering a competition with a serious competitive mindset is the closest thing we can get to simulating the training environment, which some of historical fighters certainly operated in at least for parts of their lives. And by doing this, even if you're really research focused, it also changes your research because you start asking yourself questions that you would otherwise probably not. Like, for instance, when you're preparing to enter a competition with a given rule set. And you then, for instance, review the footage of previous editions of the tournament, and you see what kind of fencing is generally practiced there, what kind of techniques are successful, which are not so much. Then you may, for instance, realize, okay, they are doing a lot of this technique. My fight book doesn't cover this technique.
Guy Windsor
So I have to figure out what to do about that.
Maciej Talaga
So what do I do? And it's a valid research question when you're investigating your fight book. What do I do? Perhaps it has an answer that I just missed. Perhaps I need to modify. Perhaps I need to borrow something from elsewhere, and if I do, does it contaminate my reconstruction or not. You are faced with serious research questions that would otherwise go unnoticed. So that's another thing, major thing, in my opinion, that tournaments do for HEMA research in general. And the third thing was that also, regardless of the rule set, rule sets may be very unhistorical, but even then, a historically minded practitioner can enter and benefit from confronting their system for sure, with a context that wasn't meant for it, but still, it reveals the differences between the past context and what's experienced today. And this is another piece of knowledge.
Guy Windsor
And at the end of the day, in any sword fight, in any context, you want to control your opponent's weapon so they can't hit you, and then you hit them. And there are ways of doing that historically, which are illegal in tournaments for good reason. And there are ways of doing that in tournaments that you wouldn't want to do with sharps, for good reason. But most of it overlaps considerably. I mean, I basically stopped competing about a year or so after I started doing this full time for a living, because again, this is the early 2000s it didn't feel particularly right or fair. I won a rapier tournament that I was the only professional in the field. So it felt like, well, actually, I just took that away from someone who deserved it. And then the development of the longsword tournament scene has so many artifacts in it, which means all the stuff I want to do as a Fiore person weren't allowed. Like no pommel strikes, I'm sorry, what? And no steel gauntlets. I am sorry. There is absolutely no way I am going into any kind of tournament with long swords without steel gauntlets on either steel gauntlets or no gauntlets, because those plastic pieces of shit, you can't hold your sword properly, and they don't protect you very well. So like, no, horrible. But for most tournaments, they don't allow steel gauntlets, so it made it kind of easy for me just to not bother going to tournaments myself anymore for those two reasons. But actually, this conversation is making me think that maybe we ought to start like a seniors’ tournament, like over 45s, because honestly, I am not interested in fencing a bunch of 20-year-olds. It's there are things you can do, but it boils down to speed and power and stuff, and it's like, no, it's too risky. Because it would be kind of nice to get back into that frame of mind. Because, I mean, I did a lot of tournaments when I was a sport fencer, between like 1987 and 1995 or something. I was at tournaments. Maybe I don't know, seven, eight tournaments a year, something like that.
Maciej Talaga
So you're not hungry anymore?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And, and then when I sort of switched over to historical stuff, the tournament scene didn't exist yet. So we did, like, local club stuff. And in my school in Helsinki, we had regular, sort of not official tournaments, but like tournaments which were run with maybe a small prize at the end for the winner or whatever, but official enough that it felt like a tournament, but not so official that you had to organise a great big thing and have scorers with computers and lights and flags and all that shit which is just such hard work to produce. So yeah, so we sort of incorporated unofficial tournaments to get that same sort of edge, and then a lot of my students just sort of take advantage of the tournament circuit to kind of get that benefit without actually having to produce it. But yeah, I think maybe I'm getting a bit slack. It's actually the first conversation about tournaments I have had in what, 15 years, which has made me think, actually, maybe I should get back out there.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, it's fun. But I also wanted to emphasise that, it's not often talked about in this historical research context, that even organisers, they are doing a huge, huge favour.
Guy Windsor
Hugely, yeah, yeah. This is such hard work.
Maciej Talaga
I think they don't get enough recognition for this, because as you said, it's an awful lot of work. Often, not very gracious. And it's just an immense asset for everyone. And it's also the place that can bring together both legs of the HEMA community. So that's one thing.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, maybe we should institute a HEMA tournament organisers appreciation prize.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, that would make total sense, certainly. And another thing is that when you mentioned this senior’s tournament, that's all good, and I think we are approaching the moment where it's actually becoming a reasonable thing to think about. But what I'm missing more than this is tournaments that are not experimental, meaning that we made up a rule set that we tested, and we just want to run it through some people, but tournaments meant as proper experiments that are designed to replicate a historical ruleset, with adjustable and controllable variables that we are testing, right where you run a tournament, gather information that you were specifically primed to gather from it, then you assess it against certain historical information that you prepared beforehand, and then draw conclusions. That will be actually really, really cool from the research standpoint. Nowadays, there's this great divide between sport and history, not always, but in many debates, when you look closely, it actually boils down to not to sport versus history, but to war fighting and civil fighting. Because many people sort of conflate historical fancy with martial fencing, understood as a no whole real fighting to the death. While we know for sure that this is but a fraction of historical fencing for sure. We know that a lot of you know fighting systems in the past, they were not about martiality understood this way. There were different practices. So, this divide is not so much about sport versus history. It's about combat fighting versus non-combat fighting. Or you can use many names for it, but you get what I mean.
Guy Windsor
So, à plaisance, or à outrance. A plaisance also is for honour and for show and for pleasure, and à outrance is to the death. And they were distinct in the Middle Ages. They even have specific terminology for it.
Maciej Talaga
In German they had Ernst Fechten and Schimpf Fechten, which is an equivalent, roughly. So I would really like to see this taken into account and events designed specifically to recreate certain historical context of fighting. Because nowadays, when people try to create non-sporty tournaments, they usually end up emphasizing strength, even brutality, in some cases. So we are approaching the historical part of HEMA too narrowly.
Guy Windsor
Yes, that's fair.
Maciej Talaga
It's like, you know, throwing the baby with the bath water.
Guy Windsor
All right. Now, the thing that made me get in touch with you was your article, Probing the Depth of Medieval European Body Culture. And I would be very remiss if I didn't bring up the subject, because we're sort of almost there already. Could you just summarise for people who haven't yet read your article, which I will definitely link to in the show notes so they can go and read it. But for people who haven't read it yet, could you just sort of summarise what it's about, what it's based, on what your conclusions were?
Maciej Talaga
Okay, it's actually an interesting case. I wrote this paper because I actually needed to write another paper that was getting too long to be published, and I had to sort of outsource part of it.
Guy Windsor
I've got books like that.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, yeah. So I did this as well with this paper. And the actual paper, I haven't written it yet. This one got published already. So the real paper is going to be more focused on the particular manuscript that I investigated. This manuscript, 3227a, or Pol Hausbuch and the physical culture from which it supposedly emerged. But in order to deal with this, I needed to explain what my sources are for reconstructing this physical culture. And these sources happen to be really, really scattered and poorly or under researched, to say the least. So what I ended up doing in the paper that we're talking about now, this one published in Cogent Arts and the Humanities, is, well, it's a review article that gathers the sources on late medieval physical culture and in doing so, it also points to links connecting this late medieval physical culture with the culture that was before it in the earlier Middle Ages, and also the one that you know came after in post-modern period. So what it does, it gathers sources. It also shows the continuity in culture, especially the continuity that is commonly rejected, or ignored rather, in modern scholarship on the subject. Because, when you read larger works on the history of the body or history of physical culture or sports, generally, the history of sports used to be assumed to end in the 19th century, because historians of sport have long defined sports in a way that would mean that it emerged in the 19th century. Later they moved the boundary to the 16th century, and there it stopped. So it's really hard to actually argue that there were sports in the Middle Ages.
Guy Windsor
Of course there were, we know what they were. They had all sorts of them. We've got illustrations of people playing them.
Maciej Talaga
That's right, but it's hard, because the source base is so scattered, it's hard to do it quickly. You just can't know. It's not obvious to us. And another thing is that these reconstructions of early modern physical culture, they Well, they sort of subscribe to the grand narrative of modern modernisation. And part of this narrative is that there was a sharp break between the physical culture of the Middle Ages and then came the Renaissance, or, more precisely speaking, the early modern period. And this break is about this subliming the body that is supposedly the early modern period was all about quantifying motions, putting them into geometrical frameworks, designing the body to conform with these abstract concepts like geometry or numerical relations, this kind of stuff. So this is how the narrative goes, and the narrative then follows that this was a step that was necessary to step out of the Middle Ages, and it's like world views and its model, and to carve what later became the scientific revolution, the enlightenment and so forth. And we are at the end of this rather linear process. So what I try to show with this paper, tentatively, because it's a review article more than a research paper, actually, but what the review reveals is that there is much more continuity between the Middle Ages and the early modern period than is currently assumed in the in the scholarship. So I argue that this break is, well, at least it's not so sharp. And I personally believe that actually there was no real break whatsoever in most important respects.
Guy Windsor
I mean, we've lived through a similar shift that historians in a couple 100 years’ time are going to look back and go between 1950 and 2000 the world changed completely because the advent of computers and the internet and all that sort of stuff. And that's absolutely true, but it wasn't evenly distributed, and it wasn't sudden. I wrote my first email probably 15 years after certain elements of the population had been emailing regularly. Because I just didn't see the point of it. Write a proper letter for God's sake. I don't want to get some like, tacky email thing, and I wasn't alone. And if you think, like geographically, the narrative goes mainframes, desktops, laptops, mobiles, except in large, large swaths of the planet, it went no computer - mobiles. Because it's the first sort of computer device that's actually cheap enough and yet functional to actually be useful to people living in, for example, large chunks of Africa. So, I mean, in Finland, the Middle Ages kind of petered out in the 17th century, I would say. And in England, they petered out in the 16th century. And in Italy, they petered out in the 15th century. But they petered out. They didn't just stop. It's like the Renaissance began on Thursday, the 22nd of August, at three in the afternoon. It's nonsense.
Maciej Talaga
That's why increasingly medievalists and early modern period scholars are talking about the long Middle Ages. But somehow, this shift, has so far, rather omitted the physical cultural history.
Guy Windsor
So okay, I would absolutely love to find a historical training system that I could recreate in some detail, the same way I've recreated Fiore’s art of arms, for instance, to get an idea of how people were training in a particular period, but I would guess that it is less effective than modern scientific methods, because, well, I mean, if you look at look at athletic records over the last century, they've just been getting better and better and better. I mean, people thought it was impossible to run a mile in under four minutes, then Roger Bannister did it. And now if you can't run a mile in under four minutes, you're never going to get to the Olympics. But at the same time, it would be a really useful way of getting into that headspace and seeing how they viewed what it was they were trying to accomplish. So do you think there's any prospect of actually finding a workable, historical training method?
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, I do, actually, this is what I this one of the things I did for my doctoral thesis, okay, which by the way, I'm now in the process of preparing for publication.
Guy Windsor
Excellent, good. I'm one of the, maybe 50 people worldwide who will actually read it. Let me know as soon as it's out.
Maciej Talaga
I hope it’s fifty, that would be great.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, nobody ever reads PhDs, but honestly, it's some fascinating stuff like and it just moulders away in university libraries because no one ever reads them.
Maciej Talaga
There is a large piece of literature from the Middle Ages that in Latin, it was like jointly referred to as regimina sanitatis, meaning health regimens. It's a large body of literature that generally covers wellbeing, broadly understood. But they approach this pretty holistically, and the guiding principles that they were following in the Middle Ages, in these texts were connected to how to manage your natural heat, which was connected to your humours, like these fluids or elements that sort of governed how your body worked and maintained its balance. And natural heat was regulated through a deliberate treatment of effort and rest. So physical exercise was an important part of it. So they had quite a lot to say about how you approach this, so you can gain useful information there. We have like splinters of data in fight books here and there. We have also something that can be called ego documents. That is, for instance, autobiographies, or memoirs, this kind of stuff, where we can glimpse a little bit into what was actually practiced.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, there's one about prescriptive text, Jean Le Maingre, someone wrote one about him and there's like details of some of the feats of arms he could do and some of the things he did to train.
Maciej Talaga
Outstanding individual, yeah, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I mean, he was, like, top knight in the whole of France.
Maciej Talaga
So he might not be very representative for the typical practitioner. But we have other sources. There is, for instance, well, it's not technically Middle Ages, it's early modern period. But we have the books left by the members of the Schwartz family from Augsburg who are, who are burghers, townspeople. And they also mentioned being trained in fencing. And they mentioned the frequency with which they trained, for instance. We have an anonymous account by a Czech student in Bologna who in one letter, he describes his daily schedule, and he mentions waking up, praying and having a lesson with his law teacher, and then he goes to the fencing school for two hours, then he has dinner, and then he gets back to the fencing school again for another two or three hours. And then he has free time and goes to meet his friends. So we have these,
Guy Windsor
What a life, skip the law lesson. But other than that, that sounds like a really good day.
Maciej Talaga
I can take the lesson if I can go for five hours to fencing school. So we have some prescriptive sources like this regimina sanitatis. We have also some ego documents that sort of offer us a perspective into how these things were applied by people. So if we triangulate these sources together, no training protocol designed for an individual has been discovered so far, but we can get a basic idea or an outline of what would be a desired framework of physical conditioning for a fighter.
Guy Windsor
I'd want to know, like, details about the exercises. What kind of weights are they lifting? What sort of exercises are they doing, are they using Indian club type stuff and staffs and stones. I want to know about the actual training gear and how they were using that gear. We have a lot of that stuff from the 19th century and even the 18th century, but really not much that I've come across earlier. You see illustrations of people doing it, and that's fascinating, like that famous sol diagram in the picture, des faires, something or other. I'm forgetting the name.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, I know which one you mean, yeah.
Guy Windsor
I'll look it up and stick it in the show notes. [It’s De Sphaera Mundi]
Maciej Talaga
There's more than this one, there’s like a whole cycle of the Planetenkinder. And most of them contain physical exercise of sorts. So we have iconography. If we just take a sweeping look through the iconography for the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, you can create a catalogue of physical activities that are confirmed in the iconography. And this would include things like certain acrobatics or calisthenics, like doing bridges, headstands, handstands, various forms of jumps. We have depictions of Swiss mercenaries entertaining themselves in the camp during campaign. And we see there people jumping and another person assessing the distance of the jump and marking it with sticks.
Guy Windsor
The modern army does that. The standing long jump is a standard military test of leg strength.
Maciej Talaga
So we have this. We have this in the iconography. We have it mentioned also in some places, like the book Weinsberg is a biography of burgher from Cologne. And he also narrates about certain physical activities that he supposed to be beneficial for the youth. He mentioned jumping, also jumping across ditches. So they clearly had this. We have depictions of runners. We have depictions of people swimming, climbing. We have people throwing stones. We have people lifting stones, lifting smaller stones, like pressing them over their head, gathering larger stones.
Guy Windsor
I have lots of metal stones that I lift over my head.
Maciej Talaga
That's right, yeah. There are rare depictions, but I haven't found those during my doctoral research, but I then saw someone else. I can't remember now, I may dig it out later, but now I can't remember, but I know that there are people who found evidence of using metal weights, like dumbbells. This is what they call it, yeah, more like dumbbells. So they are, they are mentioned in certain sources. Of this I was aware, but apparently, they found iconography for them. So they had different kind of weights. We also know that they would especially fencers, like specifically fencers would use weighted shoes. For instance, they would put lead under the soles to condition their feet better for fencing specifically, for instance, Michel de Montaigne mentioned this about his father, who used to be an outstanding athlete, and he would use this for training.
Guy Windsor
Interesting, because Fabris says that you should approach as if you were wearing leaden soled shoes as a metaphor for moving slowly and carefully, because your feet are heavy. So people were actually putting lead in their shoes, to weigh their shoes down so that they would, my God, I've got to try that. I have got to try that, maybe not actual lead, because it's poisonous.
Maciej Talaga
But I tried with weight on my ankles, and it's fun. Anyway, so we have this. We have also accounts about pouring lead into rods of some sort to be used as training implements for fencing.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so are you going to summarise all of this or write all this up and publish it?
Maciej Talaga
Well, not all of this in the book that I'm writing now, because it's sort of a little bit beside the topic, and the original dissertation is already too long. I need to shorten it, like almost 200 pages for I can't include everything, yeah, but perhaps in the future.
Guy Windsor
Or maybe just stick them on your Sprechfenster blog.
Maciej Talaga
I'll try, but it also takes time, so I need to first do the book, and then perhaps.
Guy Windsor
Just because I want to know where to find this stuff, so I can then start looking into it and copying it.
Maciej Talaga
And, yeah, because it was pretty sophisticated, they had really interesting exercises. Sometimes, there was in Germany, they had the thing called Wandlaufen, which would be a little bit like parkour, because they would run vertically up the wall with long nails in their hands. And they would try to stick the nail into the wall as high as possible.
Guy Windsor
And so you can see how high you got, because that's where your nail went.
Maciej Talaga
Now I'm quoting from memory, because it was long ago when I read the actual account, but I think there is still a town in Germany where they have these nails, supposedly planted by a historical figure, one of the princes. There is also a stone that was supposedly lifted and thrown far by Christopher the Strong, one of the German princes, from the 15th century. And it's still preserved, and it weighs around 180 kilograms.
Guy Windsor
Bloody hell, that's a lot of weight.
Maciej Talaga
So we don't know if he actually tossed it, but this gives you an impression of what they could consider credible, in terms of weights. So it gives you some indirect indication of the kind of load we're dealing with, and there's more. So their physical culture was there. It was sophisticated. And they clearly had ideas about how to combine these things together into a sort of physical conditioning regimen.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that's fantastic. Now I know you have time constraints, so I'm going to skip over a couple of things and get to the two questions I ask all my guests. The first is, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?
Maciej Talaga
There's a couple. I thought hard about this question before the meeting, I couldn't decide on one.
Guy Windsor
Well, give me two.
Maciej Talaga
Academically, the thing would be proper anthropology of modern HEMA, as a revived piece of intangible cultural heritage. I think it would be very interesting.
Guy Windsor
So that's an academic paper, or a book?
Maciej Talaga
Both, a paper, a book, but also, as something facing to the public. Because this would help HEMA learn about itself quite a lot. And I think it would also because people in HEMA, they are actually they are shy, in a way by which I mean that people, you meet great researchers or great competitors in HEMA who really accumulated skill. They accumulated knowledge. In all respects, they achieved a lot. And they constantly downplay, not only their own achievements, but the whole community.
Guy Windsor
It's like they're all English. That’s the most English thing to do. Getting guests on this show, same problem. There are people I've approached who I think have made an interesting contribution to historical martial arts, and I want them to come on the show and talk about it, and they're like, oh, no one wants to hear from me. I mean, it's only just a little paper.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, it's hard. But I think, I generally think that he might is not only like something admirable in itself, but I think it is also something that contributes to the society as a whole, and this is what I would like to research properly. So that would be one thing.
Guy Windsor
That would be fascinating.
Maciej Talaga
And the other thing, more like practical or the more fun thing would be to actually recreate, for instance, the Strasbourg tournament based on the preserved rule set that we have from the late 15th century. Really carefully with the whole material environment, perhaps with the drummers and the stuff. It would be a staged event, but with a competitive aspect.
Guy Windsor
But the same weapons and the same lack of protection?
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, that's right.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, the sort of competitions where some of these Tough Mudder type things, where people are crawling over barbed wire and jumping through waterfalls or whatever the hell. And people parachute out of perfectly air-worthy airplanes. They literally just jump out, trusting on a handkerchief to kind of slow them down. So there's precedent for people being willing to do things that appear to be very dangerous. And thing is, mostly people didn't die doing this. Mostly, they didn't die. So, I think the health and safety issue is the biggest stumbling block there. But it would be absolutely fabulous to see, I would love to see that.
Maciej Talaga
But you asked about dreams.
Guy Windsor
So the best idea you haven't acted on yet, so that is an idea that could be acted on, but you're going to need quite a lot of money to do it well. So is that also, if someone gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide, how would you spend it? Would a chunk of that go towards your Strasbourg, yeah, okay, all right, yeah, I think that would be an excellent use of the money. And would you do anything else with the rest of the cash?
Maciej Talaga
Well, that's harder. I think that I would probably think about some sort of stipend. Because HEMA, especially in Central Europe, in Central Eastern Europe, well, it's not a very affordable hobby or sport. But I generally think there is a lot of value in it. So I would think about some sort of financial scaffolding, helping people from underprivileged backgrounds to experience some of it, maybe not necessarily fencing, but you know, HEMA is more than fencing. I'm also involved in researching like almost extinct Polish folk wrestling style.
Guy Windsor
Oh cool.
Maciej Talaga
Which is called Biady. So I would also like to use some of the money to help spread this and use it also as a social asset.
Guy Windsor
To develop it and basically, to secure its future.
Maciej Talaga
That's right. And also for instance, provide a nice physical activity for people who would otherwise be left out of physical culture. Because wrestling has this inherent advantage that it's cheap, folk wrestling in particular, you just need your body. You need nothing else. So, in terms of sports, it's extremely cheap, but it's still a nice sport, and it's part of the intangible cultural heritage, and it's HEMA, so we killed three birds with one stone.
Guy Windsor
Excellent idea. Okay, brilliant. Well, if I had the money, I'd give it to you. Okay, I said, if I had the money, everyone is spending their money on tournaments and equipment rather than paying historical fencing instructors. So, no I'm afraid I am cashless, but that's fascinating. Now, okay, I do have a bunch of other questions, but I know you're on a very important clock. And so we should wrap this up now. Is there anything we've skipped over that you just want to get a quick word in about?
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, one thing, totally unrelated, but at the very beginning. You mentioned that I was the founder of the HEMAtac project. It’s actually, not the case. The founder and, like, the spirit of the whole thing is Krisztina Nagy of Hungary.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I know Krisztina, yeah, she trained with me in like, 2010 or something in Helsinki.
Maciej Talaga
Oh, yeah. So I was sort of invited to participate in the project.
Guy Windsor
Sorry, that’s my failure to do proper research and preparation.
Maciej Talaga
Yeah, sure, no problem. I just wanted to clarify.
Guy Windsor
Okay, and what is HEMAtac?
Maciej Talaga
Well, yeah, good question. I mean, it's not an organisation. It's more like, well, the website is like a front page for a small collective of like-minded individuals. And what we share is a belief that, like modern Olympic fencing, pedagogy can be like used efficiently in HEMA, not only to create competitors, but also to deepen our understanding of these practices. So we started years ago when this kind of thinking wasn't very popular, and we are especially interested in actually designing ways to use the individual lesson framework for HEMA in a way that wouldn't violate the research process that much, and also, especially Krisztina, she works with conventional rule sets because she's a sabre coach. So we are exploring, actually, and especially Krisztina is doing real research there, how a conventional way of thinking can be used to shed different light, or maybe reveal certain aspects of historical practices in a different way than what can be called, the combat oriented rulesets that are derived mostly from epee or inspired by epee.
Guy Windsor
Now, it's very unusual for a 90-minute conversation to feel like it's been cut unreasonably short. So I think we might have to do a round two at some point, but I know you have to get off, so thank you so much for joining me today, Maciej, it's been lovely.
Maciej Talaga
Thank you for having me, that was a pleasure.
