Like with many historical fencers, Jessica Finley had an interest in swords at an early age, ultimately finding the Renaissance Faire to explore her interests. It was not until she acquired internet that she found what was then called Western Martial Arts and her current teacher, Christian Tobler. Since then, she has diligently studied, translated, published, and teaches everything historical fencing. Today, Finley took some time to speak about her translating work, her approach to teaching individually and with a group, and her adventures in historical fencing. This is the second part of a two-part interview. Read the first part here.
MAYTT: In your opinion, why do you think historical wrestling is not as popular as other arts or systems in the HEMA umbrella?
JF: Because everybody wants to play with swords. I get it. Swords are cool; daggers are cool; armor is cool; spears are cool. And then wrestling; people are like, “Gross. Other people aren’t cool.” [Laughs] I mean, that’s at least a piece of it. But I really do think that’s it. I think a lot of people are intimidated by the skills necessary. I think that people recognize that wrestling is a highly skilled art and that it takes years to develop competence at it. So, I think people feel like there’s only enough time to gain competence in so many things; and, “I’m here because I love swords and so I’m going to focus on that.” I think what always disappoints me about that is that people don’t understand that it’s just the unarmed portion of the system. You’re not learning a new system; you’re enhancing the system you have with how to use the exact same tactical principles, how to use the same approach to your situation, and do it when you don’t have a weapon available. Furthermore, obviously, even if we do have swords, if measure collapses and we have come close enough that we touch hands, what’s your sword doing at this point? You’d better be wrestling or get through wrestling and get out the other side, which is the best way.
I think part of it is the intimidation factor and another part of a lack of understanding that they’re not taking away from their sword time by looking at wrestling.
MAYTT: Recently, in October 2022, you were part of a team that helped translate Bauman’s Fight Book. What was that experience like for you? How did you become part of the project?
JF: That was cool. For all that I’ve talked up Ott, which is great, but we don’t have an illustrated version of Ott. So, as far as a book goes, Bauman is the best if you’re interested in wrestling. It illustrated really well and really clearly. The illustrator obviously knew what they were doing as there are corrections – there are places where they drew the hands somewhere else and then they axed through it and placed the hands where they intended to be. So that says that the pictures were being checked to be intentionally correct. It has big paragraphs of descriptive text. Some medieval manuscripts have great pictures and no texts, some of them have all text and no pictures, this one has both and it’s really actually rare to have both for us. Then it’s organized very clearly and well. There is a clear system in how the techniques interrelate with one another, which again, in medieval manuscripts, is always obvious; we’re left to figure it out.
But in this case, it’s really clear because it’s just highly organized. And it is absolutely within the same system of techniques because the author, von Bauman, in the beginning they took this little bit of Ott’s wrestling treaties where Ott is talking about the qualities of a wrestler – their strength, their quickness, and their skill – and the three times of a wrestling match – acting first, acting last, and there’s that middle, fuzzy place where we’re both acting – and the author correlates these together in a tactical system. The author, von Bauman, took that and wrote even more about it. It’s very much within the system.
As far as translating it, it’s always been important to me to learn the original books on my own. There’s a lot of approaches one can take to do that and after working for some years to get a basic understanding, I started picking up things that hadn’t been translated or hadn’t been translated in a very long time, or were not translated into English very well; so they’re translated into English but they were by people who don’t speak English as first language, so maybe there were things that read a little confusingly. So, I started picking those up and started doing practice translations through my Patreon and providing those to my Patrons on that platform. And the big goal was to do Bauman.
I started working on that. I can’t remember how many techniques there are in it off the top of my head right now – there are a lot, like a hundred; something like that. And so, I started doing one a day; one a day for my Patrons – I can do this. And sometimes that one little paragraph would take me three, four, five hours, and some days, it would be quick and easy. It would depend on if I knew all the words in it or if it was written in a confusing way, or I had to figure out what a word was, because Medieval German is weird. It’s not like Modern German and this is technical language about a martial art, so sometimes they use words in ways that are unusual.
So that’s how I did it. And I had considered turning that into a whole book in of itself, kind of like a Medieval Wrestling 2 situation. And I just found that form of book wasn’t speaking to me. When Michael Chidester was getting ready to put together that facsimile – he’s a friend of mine – he knew I had a translation and let me know he was going to work on it and asked if I would like to contribute and I said heck yeah; let’s do that. So, the wrestling portion, which is the vast majority of that book, is from me and then Christian Tobler did the sword and messer and dagger portion of it, and then the transcription was from a gentleman from Dierk Hagedorn. It was a collaborative process, in some ways, especially when we got to the editing portion. But it’s like we all showed up with our contributions and then it came together as a group.
MAYTT: That sounds like it was a cool experience.
JF: Oh, super cool. And it’s really nice for me to really open up a facsimile of one of the old books and read the handwriting and know what it says. I’ll still shorthand to a good translation most of the time, but I don’t want to lose the ability to do that, so I challenge myself to work from the original books as often as I can. [Laughs]
MAYTT: What was it like working with all those contributors at the end?
JF: No fights, no drama. In fact, I think his last name is pronounced “flasher,” Elias Flatscher – but there’s a gentleman in Austria, Elias Flatscher, who was very interested as well. So, when we had our draft together, he had a look at it, and he had a lot of notes for us – things he would change or do differently. We definitely had a lot of editors coming in. Michael Chidester had his own opinions and thoughts as well and the editor for the product proper. There weren’t any drastic changes, but there were absolutely a lot of, “Why did you choose these words?” or “Should we reconsider these translations?” Those conversations absolutely happened, but it was lovely and wonderful. And sometimes in that, you would go after trying to fix your thing and then you would see something of somebody else’s, and you would email them about, “Hey, hold up. I think I’m going to change this which is going to change that.” But I would say it was positive and collaborative, not antagonistic or drama-filled at all. [Laughs]
MAYTT: Another one of your pursuits is armored fighting. What about this aspect of HEMA drew you to try it out?
JF: Here’s a martial arts story: I can’t remember when this was – maybe 2009 or 2010. Christian asked me how I was coming along with my work on the armored stuff; well, I’m not really interested in the armored stuff. He was like, “Well, you’re in my school, so you’re going to be interested in the armored stuff.” [Laughs] I was like, “Yes sir.” He just told me I had to because he was my teacher. But then I started looking at it and then I get it; it was a whole system. If I skip learning how these principles apply in armor, I don’t fully understand them out of armor. There are parts of the principles that I’m missing if I don’t get into that. All props to him; it was the right call to make me eat my broccoli. But I fell in love with it.
Fighting in armor is super cool and I really enjoy getting to do it. I enjoy studying it. It’s very focused and clear. Sometimes, out of armor – this isn’t entirely true – there’s almost a sense that you can kind of get away with anything. Slop counts because swords work. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t hit him how and where you meant to, but you hit him, so we’re going to take it. In armor, it doesn’t work like that; slop can’t count because your armored. So, you have to be very specific and deliberate and really get your points where you want them to be while constantly managing the fact that you’re burning so much energy fighting in armor and that you have to manage the fight in a different way.
It’s very easy to get stuck like two deer; you get stuck in this head-to-head situation and you shouldn’t, but it’s like someone pushed on you and you push back and then suddenly you’re stuck there. Armored fights are a whole other way to explore the principle of hard and soft, weak and strong, and strength and speed, and how it applies when I can’t see and I can’t breathe and all I want to do is grab onto anything that I can get a hold of and keep it, even if I should let go. It’s great.
MAYTT: That is really interesting. How different is armored fighting from the “geared up” sparring usually found in HEMA?
JF: It is very different. Sparring gear, ostensibly, is protective equipment. Though you are wearing it and it is armor in of itself, it’s not acting as armor. We pretend if I hit you in the mask, I hit your head; that’s the thought. So, the protective equipment is protecting you. When you’re fencing in armor and doing armored fencing in armor, you’re doing techniques whose purpose was to break the armor – to counter the armor itself. While you’re wearing it, it isn’t protecting you from the techniques you’re doing. It’s a very different beast in that way. I think, because of that, the techniques may be different, as far as the very specific approach you’re taking because you’re basically taking your sword and turning it into a short spear/poleaxe, depending on what you do with your sword. In fact, it’s like you almost into dagger plays with your sword. But that’s really the difference: while you’re using the sword, you’re in fact, turning it into these other weapons or using it to highlight the techniques from these other weapons, which is really fun and cool and enjoyable to do.
MAYTT: Being fully armored, would that be the only time you would put your other hand on the longsword blade?
JF: So, there are certain instances where you will fall into that half sword position, both with sword and with messer, which is a machete – a very long knife. You’ll come into that position outside of armor whenever you’re so close, that your sword is in your way, and you fall to that. In messer, they talk about it in that that’s what you would use if you a messer and somebody had a poleaxe, and they jump out of the alley with a poleaxe and they attack you. [Laughs] Anything that’s such a heavy weapon that a one hand block is not going to be reasonable, you’re going to bring the second hand on there and in that way then, be able to redirect that blow and take advantage of the situation. So, it does come up, but it’s a much narrower focus and it’s usually about measure that you’ve gotten too close, and you don’t want to wrestle, so you shorten your sword.
In fact, the old text doesn’t say that you’re fighting with a longsword, because it’s just a sword. In medieval times they just called them swords. It’s your sword that you’re holding our long. And when you go into armor, they’re like now it’s the sword that you’re holding short. But it’s the same sword; it’s not that it’s a longsword or a short sword.
MAYTT: Who would you consider to an influential person or people in the American HEMA movement? To you, what sets these individuals apart from the rest of their peers?
JF: There are a lot – there are a lot of people.
Obviously, my instructor, he would be my first choice, top pick. He published one of the first, if not there first, translation and interpretation of a German medieval work in English in 2002, which is incredible. Not terribly long thereafter, maybe 2006 or 2007, did entirely an interpretive work that was boiling the system down so that a modern person could pick it up, understand it, and work with it. Those books being published are part of the reason why most of the people doing HEMA these days, when you look at it online, they’re all talking about the German system. But why are they talking about the Italians or the French or the English? It’s because nobody published about them in English forever ago. Certainly, there are people who study those things, but they didn’t gain the traction and popularity that the German stuff has. I think that can be traced directly back to Christian publishing so early and going around doing seminars so early, and making the stuff accessible for people, because if you can’t read it, you can’t work with it.
Certainly, there are a lot of other names out there: Greg Mele, he’s the Chicago Swordplay Guild, founder or own of the founders. They study the Italian system, both the medieval and the later period rapier-focused manuscripts. He has helped get a lot of things published, as well as having a very important school and writing his own works and being one of the founders of the western martial arts workshops. It was one of the biggest HEMA events ever. I think they capped at 125 people and there’s some events that are bigger than that for sure. But for the longest time, it was the place to be, and it is still one of my favorite events for going and really expanding your knowledge.
Those are the two that I think of as being two really influential people.
I think the third person I should mention is Jake Norwood, who really helped bring events with a tournament mentality to popularity. That was largely due to his influence. He created an event called Longpoint, which ran for a number of years, which other people. There’s a lot of people; we can spend three hours with cool people. But he was one of the founders or the founder of Longpoint and ran that for a number of years and really helped set, at least for the American HEMA scene, what the base level of rulesets were going to look like to help bring out more of the art in our sparring and in our tournaments. He really helped drive that, as well as he’s a great martial artist and he knows his shit.
MAYTT: Final question. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like there is a fair amount of female representation within HEMA compared to traditional Asian martial arts. In your experience, how much does this statement hold up?
JF: I do think we do have a fair, few women – that is pretty great. I would like to see more, of course. But I think we’ve done a pretty good job at creating an inclusive place for people of all genders to begin and participate on a beginner level. I think where we have work to do is getting more genders represented as instructors. I think part of this is societal – there’s only so much that can be done and some pieces of it are just the way America works. For instances, a lot of women tend to drop off their study of martial arts between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. You could probably take some guesses as to what they’re doing with their lives during that period. And that can really hamper a woman’s progression towards being in an instructor’s role or a leadership role, if you got to take ten years off to raise kids. I think we have some work to do there. I would definitely like to see more representation at the higher levels, if possible.
When I think about Asian Martial Arts, it seems to me that there may be more female instructors as a percentage, maybe not more participants. So, there’s an interesting thing that happens. Maybe that’s my perspective, it might not be accurate. We would have to look. But it seems like women that get into Asian Martial Arts, maybe, drop out less before they get to the higher level. It could be indicative that HEMA doesn’t have a clear path towards becoming an instructor; towards little “m” master, not being a grandmaster, but towards mastery of the art. And I think that might be partially true too.
We’ve come a long way in recreating part of what the books tell us to do. I think we have a lot longer ways to go in learning how to keep whatever we’ve created alive. How do you keep a school alive? Is it only around because I’m there? Maybe I didn’t do my job then, but these are hard questions and I think these are things that interest me – I think they interest a lot of people.
I know a lot of people have been discussing mentorship lately. That idea of what is a mentor; do we have them in HEMA; how do we set them up? Because we’re having to figure them out.
So, with regards to women and other non-male genders, it strikes me that maybe that’s just a canary in the coal mine situation. Highlights for us where we have work to do.
MAYTT: Making the environment inclusive, especially at the beginner’s level, how do you personally set up so that it is inclusive enough for everybody?
JF: I believe in aggressively flying your flag. There are rainbow stickers on my door. All sorts of things like that. When you’re thinking about it, I always think of this interview with John Stewart that he wanted more female comedians working for the Daily Show, more women writers in the writer’s room, and everyone was like, “You’re going to hire some people, so here’s our top resumes.” And he’d flip through, and it would be all dudes. He thought that if he just said, “Bring me the best,” of course minorities would be represented, but it’s a numbers game. He realized he had to say, “Bring me resumes of people of color; bring me resumes of women; bring me resumes of trans people. That’s what I need to see.” And suddenly, they were there. If you got a jar of red M&M’s and there’s three green ones in there and you want more green ones to make it to the top and you grab a handful, chances are, you’re not going to get one. and that’s what he was running into.
So, I think about that. I make efforts to make sure that it’s obvious in my school that swords are for everyone. I have my little logo that an artist made up that says, “Swords are joy.” And it’s very colorful and very hearted. Yes, I take my martial arts seriously, but that doesn’t mean it has to be red, black, and grey; I don’t have to show up in fatigues and a black t-shirt because that aesthetic sends a signal to who belongs there. Just being like, “Martial arts are literally for everyone.” I want children; I want women. I have people that come to train with me with disabilities. I’ve had older people who could barely move come to train with me. I have a gentleman right now who had a heart attack, almost died, and wanted to make a change in his life. He’s in his mid-sixties, quit smoking, he lost 150 pounds, and he has a long way to go and wanted something that he could be passionate about. He likes swords; great! I am here for you.
If I said, “I’m a school how wants to produce medalists at nation-wide tournaments,” he wouldn’t necessarily have a place at that school. I say, “Swords are for everyone, and swords are for joy.” And so, I get everyone. I am happy about that. That’s the way I want it to be.
MAYTT: Thank you for this great conversation, Jess!
JF: Thank you for having me; it was fun!
This is the second part of a two-part interview. Read the first part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 