Archive for category: News

Dear Members and Observers,

IFHEMA CUP UPDATE!

The IFHEMA Cup is coming closer and we really look forward to welcoming you all in Athens! Registrations are starting to come in, several among you are preparing their teams. For those who didn’t yet fill out the Basic Registration Form, please do so as quickly as possible, so that the Greek Federation, our generous host for this event, has a clear idea of whom to expect. For the full registration of the team members, you have time until the end of summer, but the basic subscription should be in by July 15^th ideally. If you have questions regarding practicalities (like lodging in Athens), you can contact George Zacharopoulos. A list with potential accommodations will be published shortly.

Another new aspect of the Cup is that on the basis of its results a country ranking will be set up, as a first step towards the development of a real international championship. So don’t miss out on this one!

Finally, we are happy to announce the IFHEMA Cup Discord server set up especially for the occasion. We welcome you to raise questions, give your input and discuss Cup-related issues. It will greatly facilitate communication and hopefully get everybody involved in this project by the international community and for the international community. Access to it will be easy since we want to implicate as many people as possible.

The link to the Discord server was already sent to the Delegates and Observers.

UPDATE GENERAL ASSEMBLY!

Please keep in mind that the day after the Cup, Sunday 7 September, our annual General Assembly (GA11) will take place. On this occasion, elections will be held for a new Executive Committee (EC, the IFHEMA Board). All full member Delegates have voting rights. We hope to welcome many new faces, as a refreshment of the team would be a good thing after the years of engagement of its present members: new blood and fresh new ideas for the coming years. Even young HEMAists can be co-opted into the EC which gives them the opportunity to getting to know the functioning of IFHEMA more closely, as a preparation for a potential more formal future role.

We are happy to announce that the Austrian Federation has nominated Andreas Klingelmayer as their candidate for the next IFHEMA Presidency. Andreas as already started to assemble his potential crew. We strongly encourage other Member federations and Observers (they, too, can submit candidacies) to step forward and present their candidates, as all positions are open to everyone. More information about the different roles in the EC will be available shortly on our website. In case you’d like to know more about Andreas’s plans and vision, contact: [email protected]

Signed,

Call for Participation

All HEMA competition enthousiasts, take note!!

The International Federation of Historical European Martial Arts (IFHEMA) relaunches its international tournament.

Thanks to an agreement struck last year between IFHEMA and DTE Dijon, the IFHEMA Cup will be held in Dijon biannually during HEMAC Dijon from 2024 onwards. This year (2023), IFHEMA is setting up a test event where the new format of its IFHEMA cup will be tried out during HEMAC Dijon XX. The first edition of the new IFHEMA Cup will be curated by the French HEMA Federation.

We are reshaping the concept of national teams that was first applied during the IFHEMA Cup 2015. Mixed teams will be selected by each national member federation, wishing to contribute. The number of each gender per team should be 30% or higher. Fighters will have the option to fight either in mixed or in their own gender category (opt in/opt out). Rule sets will be variable within an IFHEMA Tournament Framework.

For the test event this year (2023), we will need volunteers, fighters, and staff, to help us see what needs to be improved, changed and/or reworked.

Volunteer fighters in this test event DO NOT need to be sent by their federations.

The test event will take half a day and be longsword only for now. We need maximum 40 fighters and about 16 staff volunteers. The number of women per team should be 30% or higher. Each team will be composed of 5 people (ideally, 3/2).

We intend to test several ways of judging and scoring for technicality, not for hits only. To participate in the test event standard tournament equipment will required (details will follow in the document specifying the rule set). Fighters will have the option to fight either in mixed or in their own gender category (opt in/opt out). You can sign-up as a pre-made team or as an individual fighter. Individual fighters will be assigned to a team later. All HEMAC Dijon participants are welcome to subscribe, even from non-IFHEMA member countries! In case there are more candidates than places, people will be selected on a ‘first sign, first come’-basis.

If you are interested in participating please sign-up using the following link:

https://tinyurl.com/IFHEMAcup

or contact Marine Beaumel at

[email protected]

if you have any questions. The rule set, planning and the precise date will be communicated soon.

• Second Call for Contributions

            Extended deadline: September 15th, 2022 !!

On the occasion of the International Federation of Historical European Martial Arts’s ninth General Assembly, and to celebrate the cooperation agreement signed between the Museum of Martial Arts (MAM) and IFHEMA, a symposium is organised in Brescia, Italy, 3-4 December 2022. The collections of the MAM constitute the largest single private collection of HEMA-related source-material in the world, and the goal of the cooperation is to render these collections more accessible to both the HEMA and the academic community.

The Symposium will be held at Brescia, December 3-4th, 2022, and will take place on the site of the museum.

The corpus of texts known as Fight Books spans at least five centuries (XIV-XVIII) and deals with the art of individual combat in all its intricacies and manifestations as practiced in Europe during the given period. Assuming that the readership of these texts consists primarily of people practicing fighting themselves, and since fighting is practiced everywhere and in all layers of society, this corpus is characterized by its potential to cross boundaries. This essential feature is manifest on at least three levels: 1) even when dedicated to specific social strata,  the corpus of Fight Books seems to permeate different social classes; 2) the phenomena of translation, linguistic borrowing and intertextual referencing are a typical feature of the corpus; 3) Especially in the Renaissance the overlap between different ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’ in both sources and practitioners is striking, and testifies to the changing relation between ‘art’ and ‘science’ in general over that period. Our corpus is a valuable but still underestimated witness to that cultural transformation process.

In a nutshell, stressing the intellectual richness and the cultural pluriformity of the Fight Book corpus will shed new light on what can be considered as “European cultural heritage”.

Based on this observation, the symposium aims at stressing the linguistic and intercultural interactions and exchanges within the corpus. It therefore focuses on multilingual sources, contemporary translations, commentaries and re-interpretations, as well as adaptations developed to counter, integrate or disseminate a given fighting system or master.

Topics may include

• multilingual sources
• translations and cultural adaptations
• counter systems in a different cultural/linguistic context
• educational strategies
• cultural shifts related to social mobility
• interdisciplinarity between arts and the idea of the “uomo universale”
• …

Proposals should include a title, an abstract (200 words max.) and a brief biografical note, and send to [email protected] before September, 15th, 2022.

Contributions in different European languages are welcomed. Contributors are expected to provide an English translation of their abstracts, and to ensure the linguistic accessibility of their contribution for their target audience.

Presentations will be videorecorded and made available afterwards. Publication of accepted contributions on different platforms will be arranged. Updates on this follow when available.

The event welcomes contributions by members of academic community, as well as by independent researchers and HEMA practitioners.

For informall inquiries, contact the Curators:

Karin Verelst ([email protected])

Roberto Gotti ([email protected])

Scientific Committee                                                 Organising Committee

Karin Verelst             Roberto Gotti                         Filipe Martins

Myriam Vogelaar      Hélène Leblanc                    Roger Norling

Daniel Jacquet           Manuel Valle Ortiz               Jacopo Penso

Olivier Dupuis           An Smets                               Moreno Dei Ricci

Dierk Hagedorn        Roger Norling                        Laura Boschetti