Josh Little began sword fighting when his high school physics teacher introduced LARP to him, which led Little to try out the Society for Creative Anachronism and Olympic Fencing. Later, in the late 1990s, he found historical fight manuscripts and never looked back. Around the same time, Little established his Ars Gladii, teaching a myriad of historical fencing systems. Using the skills he learned while in academia, Little approaches the manuscripts trying to place them in the time’s context. Today, Little took some time to talk about his extensive time in historical fencing, how the HEMA movement and community has evolved over the years, and what are some of the important aspects of historical fencing. All images provided by Josh Little et. al. This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Hello and welcome Josh! Thank you for joining us to talk about your historical fencing experience!
Josh Little: Thank you for having me here. I am excited.
MAYTT: When and where did you first start training historical fencing?
JL: Let’s put a bunch of things into this. So, I started – I’m going to leave out all the things that we did as kids, beating each other up in the backyard with the Ren Faire weapons – all of this because I got introduced to an old Boffer LARP (Live Action Roleplay) when I was junior in high school. We actually got introduced to it by our physics teacher, which was fantastic. He was probably four years older than we were, so it wasn’t weird. So that was 1991 or 1992. That was how I got involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) – a peripheral basis. So, I started there.
I then went and did the last hoorah of dry Olympic Fencing in the early 1990s. I continued to do some stuff and it wasn’t until the late 1990s – sometime in 1999 – where I discovered these sets of surviving historical manuscripts that actually told us who to fence for real as opposed to making it up and just hitting each other with sticks and Boffer weapons. I think it was from the original SwordForum; this was back when sword form was little more than a guestbook app/page. It was all one page – it was these various long threads all through them in there with people talking about Hans Talhoffer manuals and things like that. That became my gateway into that kind of stuff. I found some of the very limited publications that were out at that time. I think at the very beginning, it was Mark Rector’s Talhoffer translation just titled Medieval Combat. John Clements had a couple of books out and some of the early groups like Wild Roses had their Fiore pdf that was floating around. Academy of Europe Medieval Martial Arts (AEMMA) – I’m sure people will love me telling you about this – had a really old version of their internal curriculum floating around a little.
And it was from there that I found the people that I would have had been fighting with, at that point, for almost a decade. I was like, “Look! It’s all the real stuff! We gotta go do this!” They were reluctant to start but I persuaded them, “We’ll go entertain Josh and his crazy ideas.” That’s how Ars Gladii got formed in its very first iteration. I think the way I counted, we are on Ars Gladii six or seven. [Laughs] Something like that, in terms of how things evolved and changed and what not.
MAYTT: It sounds like you had your own adventure to find historical fencing! In 1999, you founded your Ars Gladii, in its sixth or seventh variation. What factors influenced your decision to take on such a commitment?
JL: So, I started out with those and started taking the people that I’ve been fighting with at that point. One of my friends at that point, who now later on became one of the founding people for Team America for the Battle of The Nations, we did some things, and him and I went back and forth, and we started with stuff that we could find at the very beginning. He ended up having a kid, I ended up finding some new people; those ones were interested in doing rapier so we did a bunch of stuff with Capo Ferro, which, at that point, my twenty-five/twenty-six-year-old legs could handle, but my almost fifty-year-old legs can’t even think about doing that anymore. When I found some other people who wanted to do longsword, we did that.
And probably for the first six or eight years, it was mostly me finding people doing a lot of stuff in wherever we could find it. I ended up trading some websites for some time in a church meeting hall. I did a bunch of stuff in my backyard. Especially as the winter would come on, we did pugilism; we did dagger and wrestling in my little, tiny basement, where we discovered – I don’t know why I chose to do this, but I painted the walls with a textured paint that had a sand texture to it – doing dagger and wrestling throws, if you ran up against the wall, it was like sandpaper and a very interesting thing to do.
It was within a couple years after that that I discovered this thing called ISMAC – International Swordsmanship and Martial Arts Convention; it is now called CombatCon. It was the predecessor of the CombatCon people – Jared Kirby and a bunch of other guys that run CombatCon now. They were the ones that ran this thing. It was, for some weird serendipity, in Lansing, Michigan. So, I’m in the Detroit area; Lansing is about an hour and twenty minutes north of us. So, the current, big, international conference for this stuff just happens to be within an hour’s drive from my house. “Oh, that’s fantastic. Let’s go do that.” I participated in that for eight or so of the ten years that it was around.
It was there that I met a man there who now, sadly has passed away, by the name of Ken Pfrenger. Him and I and a couple of other people started a weekend retreat. The first one was on top of a mountain in Pennsylvania – not a great idea. Then we moved it into Ohio. I’m trying to remember the original, actual name of it, but we never really called it this. it was like the Cumann Something Something Something. We all called it Recreational Violence Weekend. We have t-shirts, about five or six of them, for the years that we had those things set up and it would say “RV Weekend,” “Rec Violence Weekend.” It was funny. We had a t-shirt made and I was wearing it the next year at ISMAC and Stefan Dieke – he used to be a forerunner of the Freifechter groups in Germany – is looking at our shirts and he’s like, “Is that really how you spell recreational?” And a couple of us looked at the t-shirts and – we misspelled recreational! [Laughs] We’ve been standing around for three quarters of a year wearing these t-shirts and it took the German to tell us that an English word was misspelled. So then, every t-shirt after that was going to have misspellings in it and it was the gag to find the misspelling in the t-shirt.
But anyways, rec violence weekend. We pulled people in, kind of. It was mostly Midwest, but we also pulled in people from fairly far away. I think the very first one we had Paul Wagner come from Australia. I think he was already in the states for some other reason, but he showed up and did some things for the quarterstaff and a couple of other things. We had a gentleman by the name of Bruno Cruicchi come up from Caracas, Venezuela to show garrotte, which is a folk style stick fencing that was originally based around knife and machete. So, we had a whole bunch of various people coming around doing things at that time. That was through, probably 2002 to 2012 – that ran for ten years until it started to slow down. Then Ken unexpectedly passed away, so that ended that piece for it.
This is now thirty-ish years of doing some sort of combat sport. I was also a boxer for a while, but I can’t do that anymore. That’s how I got it started. Ars Gladii, the group or school itself has come along with me – the whole way. It was always a challenge in this area to get people involved with it, for probably the first twelve or thirteen years of it. A lot of that came down to the fact that we had a lot of sword weirdo stuff going on in the Detroit area. We had a fairly established SCA presence, we had a fairly established LARP presence; there were a couple large Olympic fencing schools in the area. So, we had that critical mass of existing elements with preexisting social structures that was hard to get people into something new that they really didn’t know what was there. It was really the New York Times article, the Reclaiming the Blade documentary, and the rise of YouTube as a cultural phenomenon that broke the dam open for us, for HEMA for the southeast side of Michigan. Once those three things all come together and people started realizing that there was this thing, then people started reaching out to us: “Ok, great. There’s something to do here.” “Yeah, I’ve been waiting for you guys for twelve years. Come on! Let’s do this thing.” [Laughs]
That’s what really drove the school now to where it is. Now, we’re the first and only full-time practicing HEMA school in Michigan. We have a 3,200 square foot facility in Garden City, Michigan. We have four primary instructors and five or so assistant instructors. We run class five to six days a week. We now have a fairly heavy traveling contingent for both Midwest and cross-US tournaments. Last year [2022], we started the Ars Gladii Open – AG Open – which was a two-day, four event tournament. We were like, “As long as we can get like thirty-five people and break even, we’re good!” then all of the sudden, there wasn’t a whole lot of people signed up; what’s going to happen? And then, all of a sudden, we ended up with around 118 competitors. I think based upon Sean Franklin’s tracking HEMA Scorecard, we ended up being somewhere between the seventh and tenth largest women’s tournament recorded. That one worked out. So, we’re having the AG Open again this year. It will be a three-day event that’s going on in May, so we’re expecting about the same turnout.
MAYTT: What about the art that piqued your interest rather than Olympic-style fencing, the Society for Creative Anachronism, or medieval reenactment?
JL: Just prior to finding this kind of stuff, I just made the decision that I was not going to pursue my PhD in history. So, technically, I have a degree in philosophy with a minor in history, but that’s only because I said I’m not going to continue in academia – I need to stop paying the state. I figured if I swapped my major and my minor, I could take two more classes, graduate, and not pay more money. So, I was always in that kind of history with a disciplined mindset. Prior to that, it had been fighting; so, in 1999, I had been fighting for seven or eight years at that point in various different disciplines, whether it be Olympic Fencing, the more hardcore version of LARP nowadays, and the SCA. So, I already had that background and my already existing history as a discipline piece. As soon as I found this, I was like, “Wait, what? I can do all of those things? That’s fantastic!”
It was kind of purpose-built for the kind of thing that I would go for anyways. It was hitting both of the sides that I would want to approach something like this from. The fact that it could be studied, it could be approved on it, and the mystery and enigma element to it in terms of: I just unwrapped this layer, let me unwrap another one; now let’s unwrap the cultural context to it, then lets unwrap the personal piece of this, and who are these people and who were these people, and why might have they been using this person as a patron, and so on and so forth. All that stuff is fascinating to me, so a combination of having it starting to become accessible, hitting that historical itch as well as that physical combative itch, this was something that everybody who knew me at that time said, “There is no surprise that you’re interested in this. This is your thing; do that.”
MAYTT: Touching upon your degree in Philosophy and Medieval History; how does that academic training help you better interpret the sources and teach them to your students?
JL: So, in some ways, it does and in some ways it doesn’t. The big way that doesn’t because, as you can already tell, I tend to go off tangents and fairly spinning around through some of the weeds. [Laughs] And so, if I don’t watch myself, I could stand around for thirty-five minutes telling people about, “Here’s exactly what’s going on in here. Nuremberg, this is what’s happening at this time, and this is how it might relate to that.” And the other guys are like, “Dude, I just want to stab somebody. Show me how to stab somebody.” “Oh yeah. We’ll get to the stabbing, but you gotta understand…” I have to make sure I don’t get too far into that sort of stuff.
But it also allows me to actually take that information and then work it in. We used to have a pretty regularly attended “book club.” In that case, we were taking specific works and both working it from a technique, interpretive piece; I would do some things with language and word elements in terms of how was this word being used, what was the understood context around that kind of stuff? Some of the things like, I pull a lot of inspiration from Jess Finley and her work in terms of interpreting medieval hunting culture and language in that and how it was relates and mirrors some of the things in the early Liechtenauer period material, why are things called this, and why was this word used and what would that invoke to the person in the time period that it doesn’t. To us, we think it’s this specific word, but they see it in a different context. So that kind of thing is very interesting to me, and it starts to bring up, again, those layers of interpretive meaning and context that we don’t get, especially if we work in things with straight translation.
One of the reasons why it took me so dang long to get done with college, at least with the history piece, I have both a love and a terrible ability with languages. And so, one of the things I was waiting for my language stuff to actually get done – it’s a long story that I’m not going to get into. But getting into the language itself, both the Medieval German and the Modern German, how that stuff works together is very interesting for me and it’s why I tend to like Dierk Hagedorn’s Jude Lew translation, which has the Medieval German, Modern German, and the English. I love those things. I have to look at all the word, where does that word come from in German, how’s it shifting between the Medieval and Modern German, and how the translators are pulling that word out and what kind of interpretative shift do we have to go from one language to another language and what might that mean in terms of understanding the context of this kind of stuff.
So, for me, that’s some of the other ways it helps is being able to pull in a lot of that context and act as a filter for my students who don’t have that background, either because they just don’t have the training, they don’t have an interest more than “Tell me how this relates.” Being able to act as that kind of filter is nice because from its start, AG was very history oriented. I have done several types of reenactment stuff. I was a historical interpreter for Greenfield Village long ago when it used to have a blacksmith; I was one of the last blacksmiths working there before they shut that program down. So, I’ve always had that kind of background. Even now as we are fully into the tournament and modern sporting context that HEMA is moving towards, we still always have that background, history piece. So, we’re always talking about context and why we might have five or six different plays from the same set up; talking about what context violence might have in the actual time period and why they might want to have different options to this kind of stuff. So, we’ll talk about that as opposed, “It’s always gotta be lethal; it’s always gotta be martial.” Like no. some of this stuff is playing around in the backyard – like we all have been doing. They did this stuff like what we’re doing because it’s fun to play with swords and stabbing your friend through the neck is probably a way not to have much more fun and not have much more friends, so slap him in the butt with the flat of the blade; that’s why that’s there – its cause they’re playing around. Why might you want to lock somebody up and be able to move them as opposed to killing them versus throwing them to the ground, versus breaking their arm – why might we be doing these various different things and understanding the context itself.
Context is a big and commonly said word that comes out of my mouth, so we’re kind of big on that.
MAYTT: That is really cool, and I think context is really lost on people, not only in the martial arts but in general. Speaking about the academic side of HEMA, how important do you feel that aspect is to the HEMA movement?
JL: I’ll say it’s a lot less so now than it was ten or fifteen years ago. Now, we have gotten to a state where the knowledge that we put together from the mid-1990s through late 2000s – taking the manuscripts apart, taking a look at what these things mean. Coming up with multiple different based interpretations, testing them, reviewing them amongst each other, and figuring out a baseline for that piece, as well as doing a lot of the work behind the scenes, getting that context of who these people were, doing the actual historiography on some of these manuscripts and putting that stuff into a context. I think now it’s gotten to a point where it’s more consumable to layperson, someone that not necessarily had historiographical training, someone who is not necessarily fully interested in that, somebody who might be able to take a more academic text and be able to look and figure out what they’re trying to say or get through some of the language, and consume it in a way that’s relevant for them and gets them to a certain point where they know enough where they can go, “Ok, cool. I know enough to understand this.” I would say there are a fair number of schools that I would say, nowadays – I’m going to generalize here – that the history piece is an interesting afterthought, but the participation in the modern sport culture is more relevant to them. I would say that was a lot less so fifteen years ago. Most of the schools that were coming up with primary interpretations were doing it with a fairly historical background. The people that were ignoring this were more into swinging swords and bashing around. I think the academic aspect is less so now. I think the schools and groups that are primarily history-focused are probably more in the minority nowadays than those that are consuming it either as the collective works of that movement or that are participating in it in a modern sporting context.
I’ll go to my own thoughts and ideas, is that I found myself moving or letting go of the idea of being one hundred percent true to the source material itself. In that, I’m saying that the persons that were working with this stuff originally – the Fellowship of Liechtenauer, Meyer, Talhoffer, all these guys – they were participating in a much closer sense than we are but still in a very same way that we are now, in that, even some of the early Meyer in some of the early manuscript traditions that we so play out through those couple hundred years, he’s not learning directly from Liechtenauer. He’s learning from a lineage that sometimes has gaps in the traditions, changes in culture, all these sorts of things. Then, it was a living thing and I think we’ve gotten to the point now that we can start to somewhat participate in that living tradition.
I joke that I sort of stopped teaching Liechtenauer several years ago and now I teach Joshtenauer because we’re kind of to that point where people have started to internalize all those things that we can get from the manuscripts, work through it, take their experience, and start adding it and contextualizing into their own system, their own way of working with the material, their own emphasis and deemphasis on certain things, and being part of the recognized lineage that might be there. I’m especially talking about Liechtenauer specifically because that’s what I’m primarily a part of and that’s the longer running tradition that we have compared to some of the other ones. But there’s nothing that can’t be said about this that doesn’t apply to the other ones. To a certain point, you have this understanding of this material, I’m using it, I’m working with it, I’m describing it and now I’m describing it in some of my own terms. We’re still working with the material but now we’re now also bringing it into our own cultural and fencing context; we’re bringing it into our own levels of understanding, and we’re both breaking away and participating completely in the history of it.
MAYTT: Yes. So, it is becoming more of a living tradition and putting your own stamp on the source material. Is that correct to assume?
JL: Yes. And it’s not like I’m saying, “Here’s the new flying attack method!” [Laughs] It’s not like we’re going to take this into wild and crazy directions. But it’s more like, “This is how I do this. This is why I do this. I’m doing this for this tactical reason. And because I am doing it this way and putting this specific motion, this footwork pattern, this method of cover – whatever it is that we’re talking about – it has some other implications for the rest of the thing and how I understand the rest of the system and how I work with this.
I am primarily a distance and state of the fight/controlling fencer – that’s how I fence. Everyone knows I’m the distance fencer; I am the, “Oh, you’re two inches too close? I’m going to hit you now. You’re three inches too far away? I’m not even going to respond to that because the attack is going to fall short.” But because of that, I have very specific ways I describe and work through things. I am not saying that I am going outside of what the manuscripts say with this kind of stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff the manuscripts don’t say. Those are the things that we’re never going to get back. Those are the things that we have to discover on our own and put together. I think that’s especially one of the biggest places where that living tradition element is going to come in.
It’s going to be that we have the lines that were placed down that we can read from the existing manuscripts themselves, but the dots and colors inside of those lines, we don’t have that, and we’ll never have that. So, there are places where our understanding can grow there and can grow in an individual type nature in the fact that I see this, I read this stuff from the manuscripts, I fence it, I have experiences with it, and this is how it makes sense to me and this is how it makes sense in the way I fence and the way I prefer to fence. And then that shows me the color that goes in between those lines. That’s the stuff that I call Joshtenauer. I have specific ways of describing things and it’s nothing like how it’s described in the manuscript – ninety percent it’s not described in the manuscripts. I see that, to us, starting to get down the road that is being as legitimate in our context as some of the original manuscripts that are there – but it’s in our context. It’s not legitimate in their context; we can’t be in their context. I can’t be preparing for the potential of an honor duel on the streets of Augsburg or something like that nowadays. That’s not my context. But I can prepare for being a part of a modern tournament for developing my own style and my own club. I think that’s where, nowadays, our relationship to the historical manuscripts and the historical stuff is trending towards.
This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 