# Medieval European Body Culture, with Dr Maciej Talaga

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga.md
Podcast: [The Sword Guy Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225)
Published: 2025-12-26T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://theswordguy.podbean.com/e/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga/
Audio file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/2vmjk4gmmcsvqfu2/209_Maciej_Talaga.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225/episodes/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga
Duration seconds: 5038

## Resource

For transcriptions and more detailed shownotes, please go to: https://swordschool.shop/blogs/podcast/episode-209-medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga To support the show, come join the Patrons at https://www.patreon.com/theswordguy Dr Maciej Talaga is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. His research interests have revolved around premodern European martial traditions, with particular focus on late medieval, Central European and the so-called German School of fighting. His goal is to elevate HEMA studies into a legitimate field of research within academic history and archaeology. Maciej is a member of HEMAtac, a HEMA coaching organization, and is a qualified Olympic fencing instructor in the Polish Fencing Association. He also runs the Sprechfenster blog on Patreon. Guy first came across Maciej’s work through his article Probing the Depth of Medieval European Body Culture: Preliminary Research on Methods of Physical Training, 1250 to 1500. We talk about how Maciej got into historical martial arts, and a bit of background of the development of the HEMA scene in Poland. Both Maciej and Guy have experience of sport fencing, and we talk about how sport fencing coaching techniques can be beneficial in training historical fencing, giving you a framework for understanding concepts in historical fencing. Maciej sees HEMA as a grand project, with tournaments having a key place within this project. We discuss the benefits of the competitive environment, how it affects your training, and how it reveals the differences between what’s in the fight books and how we practice sword fighting today. Guy talks himself into getting back into tournament fencing – for seniors only, mind you. We also discuss the topic of Maciej’s article about medieval European…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225/episodes/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-sword-guy-podcast-1265225/medieval-european-body-culture-with-dr-maciej-talaga.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.