HEMA has a wide variety of sources nowadays, unlike when the AES started back in the early 1990’s. We had few resources – the Lichtenauer poem, Talhoffer’s 1467 treatise (only in German), and a few other references that were incomplete. Since then the scholarship in this has expanded greatly!
Today we have people translating treatises and publishing them on a semi-regular basis. There are multiple interpretations of some of the same works. And there are articles and web sources galore. I can’t even imagine what it would be like today if something like Wiktenauer had existed 20 years ago.
There are arguments online about how to do techniques, and what any particular Master meant in the treatises. There are armchair experts in our martial arts now, like in any of the other arts. We can never really understand with 100% certainty everything that any Master meant in their writings, even with the illustrations and the small amount practice we have. Productive sharing of information, however, is a good thing. Outright criticism without feedback is useless to everyone.
We study an art that has been revived. There is no truly continuous chain of swordmasters leading back to the Renaissance, let alone the Middle Ages. Our art died and was resurrected. In the 25 years since the AES was founded we have learned a lot. We’ve passed it on to countless people, very few who had the skill patience to become instructors. Even after teaching for 25 years I feel that I have a lot to learn.
Reading and comparing the various sources as I have, I believe that there are more similarities than differences across them. Whether I’m teaching earlier Masters, like Talhoffer or Ott, or from a later source, like Meyer, the similarities are striking. Later sources have more terminology listed. My theory is that this was to give more subtle differentiation on techniques that were often grouped under the same term in earlier periods.
When working with instructors who teach from the Italian tradition, such as Fiore, versus the German sources that I primarily use, I’ve found that they tend to teach mostly the same techniques, but using different names – Italian ones, of course. This leads me to believe that it’s a good thing to read and understand a variety of sources, as that can give clearer and more complete understanding of any given technique, and our Western Martial Arts (or, if you prefer, Historical European Martial Arts) overall.