Library

The corpus, the sources, the data.

Everything the discipline rests on, in the open — the writing, the primary sources it draws from, and the datasets behind the Field. Nothing here asks to be believed on authority; all of it asks to be checked.

The writing

The corpus

The Science of Fighting — the primer ↗
The accessible introduction to the discipline. Nine chapters, free to read.
on this site
Eskirmology — the collected papers ↗
Two decades of scholarship: the three relations, polarity, the risk models, the typology.
corpus
The Martial Arts Delusion ↗
Why style-loyalty misleads, and the modalities that classify fighting.
paper
Primary sources

Where the history is kept

The Company of Masters of the Noble Science of Defence ↗
The 1540 institution that named defence a science — the discipline’s lineage.
historical
Wiktenauer — HEMA treatises ↗
The primary-source manuscripts of historical European martial arts.
archive
Devonshire Wrestling — the Westcountry archive ↗
Cornish and Devon wrestling scholarship, including the Masters of Defence in Exeter, 1555.
archive
Open data

The datasets behind the Field

Released under CC-BY 4.0, upstream source licences honoured. Every figure in the Field is generated from these.

rear-hand-cross.datums.csv ↓
All sourced data points for the rear-hand cross, with tier, method, sample and citation.
dataset
rear-hand-cross.datums.json ↓
The same data as structured JSON, for reuse.
dataset
rear-hand-cross.comparison.csv ↓
The cross-system comparison matrix (boxing / karate / fencing).
dataset
Method

How to read the evidence

Every datum in the Field carries an evidence tier, so a laboratory measurement is never mistaken for an expert’s judgement or a contested claim.

MeasuredDirect instrumentation — force plate, motion capture, EMG.
EpidemiologicalInjury surveillance and clinical studies.
Expert-elicitedStructured practitioner judgement — labelled opinion.
TheoreticalDerived from principle or model, not yet measured.
HistoricalFrom primary sources, with interpretive caveats.
Contested / gapAuthorities disagree, or standardised data is lacking.

Authority here comes from the convergence of many disciplines and transparent sources — not from any one voice. Where the literature is genuinely divided (the psychology of killing is the standard example, its foundational firing-rate data long discredited), the Field shows the dispute rather than resolving it.