HEMA is OK

Today's article is provided by guest author Bastian Koppenhöfer, and published here with his kind permission. I assisted with editing. Bastian holds a M.A. from University of Mainz in Germany. Unlike other articles on this blog, written by me, this article is © 2021 Bastian.  A thing of beauty.

For readers who did not already know, I am moving from Minneapolis to upstate New York in the next month or so. Since I have in the past taken care of some of the admin work for the Minneapolis Amateur Swordfighting Association (MASA), my departure means that my clubmates may want someone else to take over the admin side of things.  This article addresses one element of this: Club insurance. There are other elements of club admin involved in running a club - organizational management (types of entities, who is in charge); finances and taxes; day-to-day operations (managing gear, paying bills, collecting dues); “What kind of club you want to be,” and club culture. I may write future articles addressing other elements.  So, while I could write up a guide that is exclusively for an audience of my MASA clubmates, it strikes me that this is also a potentially useful “public interest” topic, so it is written that way. Note this concerns only clubs in the United States - the insurance and adm

A funny thing happened to me on the way to being where I am with historical fencing:  I realized that the literature stuff I studied in school was actually relevant - both to thinking about history, and to thinking about fencing. Here is how. Literary Theory Part of my life path involved getting a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. Before that, though, I wanted to be a fiction writer. The main reason I never did pursue the literature path was - if I’m honest - I found a lot of it boring. I liked reading fine, but I didn’t enjoy writing - at least not writing fiction. I was engaged by some of the ideas in literary theory, though.  Literary theory doesn’t seem at first like it’s all that relevant to historical fencing, but I think it is actually pretty relevant. Literary theory, as a field, came into existence because of theoretical problems around how to interpret and understand books, stories, and other bits of text. Historical fencers working to understand and interpret the text of fen