The History of M.E.M.A.G.

The Medieval European Martial Arts Guild has an extensive history, which includes the names of some very dedicated and gifted HEMA practitioners who have given much to the art and the community at large.  

Our guild’s founder, Cory Winslow, first enrolled in classes at a school called “Live Steel Fight Academy” in Pottstown PA. back in 2003. The leader of this school had attended a John Clements (from ARMA, or the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts) seminar, and had very loosely based his curriculum on the few HEMA sources available at the time (all of them, from Talhoffer through Silver to McBane). The following year, Cory was made an instructor when he moved to Salisbury Maryland to attend colllege. In the course of teaching for LSFA for appproximately two years (using the six-week curriculum he was provided), he began to conduct his own research into the sources, obtaining copies of Ringeck, Talhoffer (1467), and Codex Wallerstein, and a few additional documents he found online.  In March of 2006 he resigned from his position and subsequently opened MEMAG, focusing on the Kunst des Fechtens of Johannes Liechtenauer, with Joshua Reptsik as his co-instructor. 

Cory himself recalls, “That year I (and John Bax, who had also been a part of LSFA and had opened a second MEMAG branch in PA) flew to Dallas to attend WMAW [the Western Martial Arts Workshop], where I met several pillars of the community, and the importance of being able to read the primary source material in its original language was impressed upon me. I started to develop a distinguished curriculum that became more and more aligned with the source material and removed much of the modernizations which were then seemingly requisite in any interpretation or curriculum. In time, this approach became a signature of our school. We soon added another branch in New Jersey under Chuck Wyatt, who had also been a student of LSFA. We also had a short-lived branch in Elkton, MD under Robert Koulakjian. As time went on, the emerging community grew larger and larger, and we achieved some fame (such as it was) through our creation of YouTube videos depicting techniques found in the sources. When Jake Norwood left ARMA, he and Ben Michels chose our Salisbury branch as the first school they would visit in their quest to form the HEMA Alliance. In time, through this connection I would serve as the vice director of the HEMAA Curriculum Council and orchestrate the Paired Technique Competition at several Longpoint Tournaments. In fact, the very first event where some of the main Longpoint organizers (Norwood, Edelson, etc) got together was a meet-up that MEMAG hosted in Chuck Wyatt’s back yard.”

From its humble beginnings to the present day, our guild has endeavored to advance the art we love and build on the work of our forebears.