Wiktenauer is an autonomous project of the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance, open for contribution from all researchers and practitioners in the Western martial arts community. Our mission is to collect all of the primary source literature that makes up our text, as well as all related research, and to organize and present it in an accessible format. Here are a few basic categories of pages that are being constructed:
- Master Pages host biographical information about each master, as well as the transcription and translation of his complete works. In cases of multiple copies of a master's work, the transcriptions are laid out side-by-side to facilitate the most accurate translation possible. To aid in interpretation, the writings will also be illustrated with images from the masters' work as available. A bibliography at the end of each page lists additional transcriptions, translations, and scans that are available in print. The exemplar for this category of pages is Fiore de'i Liberi. Ultimately, every master in all of the traditions of Western Martial Arts will have a dedicated page.
- Treatise Pages host all relevant data on a book or manuscript, including description, provenance, table of contents (with links to the appropriate master pages), gallery of page scans, and bibliography of additional print resources. The exemplar for manuscripts is the Goliath Fechtbuch, while the exemplar for printed books is Ergrundung Ritterlicher Kunst der Fechterey. Ultimately, every text in the corpus of Historical European Martial Arts literature will have a dedicated page.
- Technique Pages compile all of the relevant information from all of the relevant manuals on a particular technique, including transcriptions, translations, and images. There is also a section at the end of each page where groups may embed videos of their interpretations. The template for techniques is the Zornhaw. Ultimately, every technique mentioned in the manuals will have a dedicated page.
- Weapon Pages provide information about how a specific weapon form is described and used in the treatises, data on surviving artifacts, an overview of archaeological research pertinent to a given weapon, and a comprehensive index of the treatises and writers that discuss each weapon.
The wiki also features pages for HEMA groups, pages for HEMA events, general information pages, and almost other topic of interest to the HEMA community you can think of. If you'd like to pitch in, simply request an account and consult How can I help?
Recent Feature Additions
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When we moved to the new server toward the end of last year we upgraded the wiki platform from 1.15 to 1.19, which has opened the door to a lot of new features and got us thinking about other upgrades and enhancements we could implement. I also put in a goodly amount of time upgrading and streamlining sloppy code and css, resulting in a much smoother design overall. Here is a partial list of the improvements we've made:
- Easier navigation in the composite tables. This is one that people have requested for a while, but since it's not a feature normally found on wikis it took quite a bit of hacking to implement. Now when you scroll down in one of the big manual tables, the column headers will stay at the top of the screen so you always know what you're looking at. Additionally, when you mouse-over a cell in the table the whole row will darken to make it easier to keep your place when side-scrolling. (These features work in all browsers, but due to unresolved compatibility issues between Mediawiki and Chrome and to the fact that Internet Explorer is just terrible, this feature looks best in Firefox.)
- Gallery image viewer. While we have largely divested ourselves of locally-hosted images in favor of linking thumbnails to images in external galleries, Wiktenauer still hosts a number of sets of scans taken from public-domain books (including a few manuscript facsimiles that are out of copyright), and of course we are pleased to be the only authorized host of color scans of the fencing manuscripts owned by the Jagellonian Library in Krakow. In order to make browsing these texts easier, we've implemented a javascript-based gallery viewer that an be accessed from the category page. For example, Goliath (Ms. Germ. Quart. 2020) can be viewed here. Simply click on the green easel icon in the upper right corner of the gallery to launch the viewer. An identical viewer is available for the fencing manuals hosted on the Wikimedia Commons. (As before, Firefox handles this feature better than the others—for unknown reasons, in Chrome and Internet Explorer the images are somewhat shuffled.)
More new features...
- Footnotes. We've gone back and imported all of the references contained in the transcriptions and translations that we host, in order to give additional insight into the reasoning behind some of the decisions that our contributors make. Initially we were storing these notes at the bottom of each table, but we're currently in the process of translating them to standard end-notes that will appear in the main list of references at the bottom of each page.
- Open translations. Several people have asked us for a process of contributing snippets of translation or corrections without needing to translate a treatise entire or interfering with the work of others, so we've implemented a few options to handle this. If you identify errors or otherwise think an existing translation is in need of fixing, feel free to annotate it with your own notes using the {{ref}} template; these notes will be placed in a separate container from the main article footnote list and should be signed by the user who created them, so there shouldn't be any confusion between them and notes created by the original author. (I'll write a tutorial on this eventually, but for now contact me and I'll walk you through it.) If you want to hack out a rough translation of an untranslated treatise, whether whole or just a few lines, then you can add label the translation column open for editing and add your name to the list of translation contributors on the Discussion page. This is also a possibility if a large enough body of notes build up for an existing, deprecated translation. If enough people get involved, we hope to eventually crowd-source high-quality translations in this fashion. I've opened all of my German translation work to free editing, since it's all very rough and imperfect, and we've already got a couple other such contributions as well; see Martin Syber for an example of how this in action.
- Wiktenauer forum. I've asked Ben Floyd to create a new forum for the Wiktenauer, which can be found here. This has primarily been used for announcements until now, but if you have any questions or concerns about, or disagreement regarding, content on the wiki then this would be the place to talk about it. Let me underscore again that a lot of content on the wiki is sourced from documents that don't cite their own sources, so I would be astonished if there are not errors in the content as it currently stands and am very interested to hear about any and all of them.
- Donations. Finally, people have asked us in the past how they can donate to the wiki and help us meet our operating costs. We've now added a donate button at the bottom of the sidebar on the left which is attached to a paypal account managed by the HEMA Alliance (who are also the ones who currently pay our bills). If we ever reach a point where our income from donations exceeds our server costs, we'll look into applying the excess toward getting new treatises digitized and perhaps even licensing currently-unavailable scans to host locally on the wiki.
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What's New?
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The MS 3227a is a German commonplace book thought to have been created in 1389. The original currently rests in the holdings of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany. This manual is commonly attributed to Hans Döbringer, though he is in fact but one of the four authors of a brief section on the longsword. The rest of the manuscript is a compilation text consisting of treatises on a variety of mundane and mystical topics, including martial arts. The martial aspects of the book seem to be based on the tradition of Johannes Liechtenauer, and the text implies that he was still alive at the time of the writing.
Christian Tobler notes that the presumed date of 1389, based on the presence of a multi-year calendar in the book that begins with that year, is unjustified. The eclectic nature of commonplace books means that the calendar was likely selected due to availability (rather than applicability), and could easily have been an old calendar or even a future one. As this date is also used to estimate the time period of Liechtenauer's career, this is a significant error. (Using it to date Liechtenauer is further complicated by the fact that even if he were alive when the original treatise was written, that doesn't mean he was alive when it was copied into this manuscript.)
(Read more...)
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Historical European Martial Arts Alliance
The North American federation for historical European martial arts, providing a wide range of programs and services for its members and affiliate schools and clubs.
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Western Martial Arts Coalition
A pan-American coalition of martial artists and researchers dedicated to the study of traditional European, American, and related fighting arts and martial traditions.
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Historical European Martial Arts Federations
