Welcome! We’re the HEMAists, a collection of passionate practitioners of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). HEMA has been a constantly growing movement, with practitioners all over the world rediscovering swordsmanship, hand to hand combat, stick fighting, staff weapons, and numerous of other art forms that were practiced from various eras of the western world. Some of these arts are still living traditions, while most are painstakingly researched and revived from historical manuscripts and documents left to us by our martial ancestors. We want to share our passion with the greater HEMA community with a goal of providing high quality content and videos. Here you will find articles regarding training methods, fitness tips, discussions of historical arms and armor, and essentially anything related to the world of HEMA. Our team trains at the Virginia Academy of Fencing, whose Historical Swordsmanship program is headed by Bill Grandy. Although this site is not officially affiliated with VAF, and while we’ll occasionally have guest authors who are not part of VAF, you’ll definitely see that we’re pretty proud of our school, so the majority of our training videos and images are within the VAF walls, and we’ll also occasionally post things that are directly relevant to the Academy.
And here is a slightly longer documentary about our program:
This site is a labor of love for Historical European Martial Arts. There’s no profit involved, nor do we have any kind of agenda beyond spreading the enthusiasm we have for our arts. We hope you visit regularly and benefit from the fruits of our labor.
The HEMAists 