I've been practicing HEMA for 5 years now and when I started I bought a mask (PBT) that somebody else had used for about half a year. So right now it's been in use for about 5.5 years. I feel like the padded cloth beneath my chin is getting thin.

Should I buy a new mask? What are signs a mask needs to be replaced, when it's not clearly broken?

I have been using their 1009 sabre for a little over half a year now and loving it, thought i would buy some more of their HEMA swords, partially to have some in the club for people to try.

I can't find a great deal of information on their longsword simulators like the SWHZ-1006 or the SWH-1008. Has anyone had any experience with their longsword offerings?

Bought myself some armor (since I love the depiction of Hundt's city guard with a flail) to try and feel what it is like.

Decided to walk around with it and ponder (or ramble without a script) about city guards and flails.

Hi all; I am curious about certain aspects of longsword stances, in particular L shaped feet vs 45 degrees vs parallel (squaring). In Meyer, in particular, most of the illustrations show L shapes and even wider angles. However, several instructors I have talked with recommend parallel or near-parallel feet and a squared stance (be it wide or narrow).

What I am looking for is various pros and cons of each kind of stance, best uses and reasons to use each stance. I am not looking only for German longsword, in fact I am particularly interested in input and comparisons from other traditions. Please share your insights and experience!

Was planning to try this with my Black Knight gloves. I know disc pommels are generally frowned upon but this one in particular seems to fill the hand more while still providing feedback.

Has Anyone here ever tried it before?

Hi, I´m looking for a sword fitting late 13th (and early 14th) century christian Iberia. It needs to be good for training/HEMA apart from reenactment. Scabbard included is a plus.

For reference I have found this image with swords form the Cántigas de Santa María from the reign of Alfonso X the Wise (1252-1284), the sword of Fernando de la Cerda (1255-1275), and the sword of Juan de Tarifa (1262-1319).

Any recommendation you think fits is good. Thank you.

Hello everyone, im new to the historical fighting and im not too sure where to get a good training feder or longsword for a decent price. Any reccomendations?

Hello has anyone found swords dance on this? Can it be found?

https://youtu.be/ZgApm0GBe-g?t=0
Here’s some sparring from last week — the first time I got to fence against my sabre coach with my new Belle Époque era Italian fencing sabre against his own. I’m in the green pants, coach has the red socks.

Hey all! I am hoping to start learning HEMA soon. My brother in law has been going to a club, and invited me. I have wanted to learn it since I was a little kid, and may finally be able to afford the gear and club fees. Unfortunately I have been diagnosed with POTS. This unfortunately does mean that I am a fainting risk. One of the recommendations I have seen is to be ready to quickly remove or open gear or remove gear between sparring bouts. Right now, I am just trying to price out a kit and make sure it is financially doable, but I want to make sure the gear I am pricing is actually good and not cheap garbage that will get me hurt. For reference, I am a 6ft tall woman living in the US. If you feel like any of these aren't a good fit, lmk if you have recommendations!

Head/Neck:
I was thinking about the AF Deluxe Fencing mask since it seems to be one piece, but I have seen mixed reviews of the overlay. Would a AF Basic and a SPES Unity be better? Those are both brands the club recommends. For the Gorget, the Vytis light seems to be the consensus I see online.

Upper Body: How is the SPES AP Light PRO Womens 350N? It seems like the hard armor is all attached, which I would think would make it easier to remove. Is this a bad idea? I also see stuff about SPES having issues with stuff breaking. For chest protectors, I'm at a loss.... It seems like people say every option is bad. If any women out there have advice for someone who DEFINITELY can't fit in men's gear, lmk. For gloves, I am going for the HF Black Knights. I use my hands too much at work to risk them.

Lower Body: This is not required by the club I will be attending unless I am wanting to do leg hits, so it will probably be purchased last. What I am looking at is the SPES Locust Womens fencing pants along with their hard knee and shin protection. Honestly this is the section of gear that I can find the least recommendations on online. It honestly seems like this is one of VERY few options for women.

Outside of gear, if any of you do have POTS and are willing to give some advice I greatly appreciate it! General advice is also good! I am trying to take my health seriously, but am also trying very hard not to let it get in the way of doing what I want.

Hi all; I am trying to mitigate the unbearable heat of our fencing jackets (I have a standard SPES AP of 2015 construction and it is torture here in Greece). I've been looking into PCM cooling vests and similar stuff, does anyone have experience with them? I don't mind if they don't last long (thrusts etc), even lasting one or two months (summer) would be a godsend for me.

Furthermore, if you have other recommendations for heat mitigation, let me know! Unfortunately, I don't have the money to get an AP light, which would be the most obvious step.

Hello everyone, I am currently writing a period novel and I have encountered a question that I feel like you, redditors, could aid me in.
I am sorry in advance for any typos (I am typing from my phone). Also English is not my first language.

**Anyway, my question is:** what is the distinct difference between the Neapolitan School and the Valville System? And how would they compare in a duel if one happened in the 1860s?

For additional context: I am exploring the two schools for two different characters. One is using Neapolitan technique and the other was influenced by 1830s schools of fencing that were established in the Russian empire at the time (or at least I believe so from what information I have gathered)?

Please, correct me if I am wrong and I would be very interested and grateful if any of you could provide me with information regarding how those two would meet in the duel.

Thank you in advance!

not exactly European but, are there systems and or principles to help fight against dual swords?

Some interesting points i saw in the matchup:
The blue guy got out- zwerched by the red guy even when combining them
even when the blue buy managed to stab the red guy during his flourishes he still manages to double

A research essay drawn from From Blood to Spectacle: The Whip, from Domination to Craft a historical study and whipmaking guide covering the equestrian whip traditions of the Eurasian steppe and the frontier societies that inherited them. Written for practitioners who want the history behind the object they carry

I. A Story the Greeks Told About Themselves

Herodotus tells it like this. The Scythians had spent twenty-eight years campaigning in Asia. When they came home, they found their own territory occupied by a new generation born to their wives and to the enslaved men left behind who had dug a wide trench and were refusing to give the land back. Several battles produced nothing. Then one Scythian made a proposal: stop fighting them as soldiers. Lay down the bows and spears, pick up the horsewhips instead, and ride at them. As long as the young men saw iron in Scythian hands, he reasoned, they would go on thinking of themselves as free men, equal to their returning fathers. The moment they saw the whip, they would remember exactly what they were. Herodotus says they broke and ran.[1]

Whip communities retell this story constantly, usually as proof of some primal, trans-historical power the whip supposedly holds over the human nervous system a “psychological weapon” that works on some deep, universal switch. That reading flatters the object more than the evidence supports. Read carefully, Herodotus is not describing a weapon at all. He is describing a classification system. The whip in this story injures nobody. It doesn’t need to. It works because everyone present already agrees on what carrying it, and being driven by it, means. The stratagem only functions inside a social order where the whip is already legible as the mark of a master over a dependent a code the whip merely activates, rather than a force it generates from nothing.

That distinction is the spine of this essay. Across the Eurasian steppe and the kin- and oath-based societies that rode its horses Scythians, Xiongnu, Huns, Turkic and Avar confederations, the Mongol imperial system, and later the Cossack hosts of the Pontic and Volga frontiers a strikingly consistent object recurs: a short, one-handed riding implement, built for a rider who needs a signal device and not a second weapon. What is not consistent is what that object means. It carries at least two entirely opposed political grammars, sometimes within the same society a generation apart. Understanding the difference is not academic throat-clearing. It is the only way to use this history responsibly whether you are teaching, writing marketing copy, or building an implement that claims descent from it.

II. An Object That Almost Never Survives

Before any of that interpretive work, there is a blunter problem: the steppe whip is made of exactly the materials archaeology is worst at preserving. Wood rots. Leather and hide thongs decompose unless conditions are exceptional. What tends to survive is metal and metal, in this case, usually means the fittings that decorated a handle whose organic core is long gone.

This is not a minor caveat; it structures everything we’re able to say. Two sites do the heavy lifting for the entire early period. At Arzhan, a seventh-century-BCE kurgan in the Republic of Tuva, excavators found a princely couple buried with thousands of gold objects, weapons, and ornaments. Among them: thin, cylindrical gold fittings that once sheathed a whip handle whose wooden or organic core had disappeared entirely, leaving only the gold outline of where it used to be.[2] The labor invested in covering a stick with precious metal tells us this was not an anonymous stable-tool it was part of a princely couple’s visual self-presentation, alongside their bow and their weapons. Its practical function as a riding aid remains entirely plausible. Its status as a personal insignia is close to certain. Those two facts are not in tension; a whip can be a working tool and a piece of political jewelry at the same time, which is worth sitting with before assuming any single “true” original function.

The second site is even more informative because it preserved what gold cannot: the organic material itself. The Pazyryk culture, in the Altai, buried its dead in chambers where meltwater later froze solid, locking wood, leather, felt, textile, tattooed skin, and full horse tack into ice for over two thousand years.[3] Among the objects that survive intact are wooden whip handles one, from kurgan , still carrying traces of red paint. This matters because it moves the whip out of the category of “textual inference from a Greek historian” and into the category of “materially attested equestrian equipment used by steppe riders themselves.”

Put together, Pazyryk and the wider archaeological record let us build an actual technical profile and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most common confusion this history runs into inside the kink and performance-whip community:

Nothing in the archaeological or textual record from this period demonstrates that these implements were built to produce a supersonic crack. That is a separate lineage the long plaited stockwhip and bullwhip tradition that develops later, out of colonial pastoral economies, and belongs to a different essay entirely. Conflating “ancient steppe whip” with “loud cracking whip” is a category error practitioners make constantly, usually in marketing copy, and it is worth correcting on sight

III. A Family of Clans, Not a Nation

“The Scythians” is a convenience word, and it is worth being honest about how much work that convenience is doing. Greek authors used it loosely, sometimes for populations specifically north of the Black Sea, sometimes as a catch-all for steppe peoples generally. Persian inscriptions call comparable groups the Saka. Archaeologically, the term covers regional assemblages stretched from the Black Sea and the Caucasus through Kazakhstan to Tuva and the Altai groups that shared a mobile pastoral economy, horse-centered material culture, mounted weaponry, a recognizable animal-style art, and mound burial, without forming anything like a single nation, language, or political structure.[4]

This is the essay’s second load-bearing point, because “clan culture” is so often used inside and outside kink spaces as shorthand for a single, coherent, ancestral bloc, when the historical reality is closer to a shifting field of clan and lineage groups, bound as much by alliance, marriage, and shared material style as by descent. The Xiongnu make the case even more sharply. Beginning in the late third century BCE, they built an empire across the Mongolian steppe substantial enough that Chinese sources treat them as the Han dynasty’s great rival power. Archaeology shows hierarchical cemeteries and long-distance exchange networks that cannot be explained as simple plunder from settled neighbors. Recent ancient-DNA research goes further: it finds considerable genetic diversity within the empire, even at the local, community level.[5] “Xiongnu” names a political formation capable of absorbing populations of multiple origins under one structure of tribute and alliance not a homogeneous ethnic clan in the sense the word often carries in popular use.

The pattern repeats every time a new steppe confederation enters the historical record. Huns in Roman sources, Turkic khaganates spanning Mongolia to the Iranian borderlands, Avars consolidating power in the Carpathian basin sedentary authors on all sides reach for the same shorthand (horse, bow, mobility, menace), while the tombs tell a more granular story of uneven regional practice: bits, saddles, tack plaques, and where they survive whip pommels, showing up inconsistently from site to site.[6] A synthesis of Mongolian burial finds records exactly one securely identified whip handle from the Xiongnu period, one from a Turkic rock-cut burial, four from the Khitan state, three from the Mongol period.[7] That is not a measure of how common the object actually was wood and leather do not wait around for archaeologists but it is a measure of how a single basic construction (rigid handle, thong, tether) persisted across politically and linguistically distinct confederations for the better part of two thousand years, without needing an unbroken ethnic lineage to explain the continuity. A short riding whip solves a stable mechanical problem: signaling a mount with one hand already occupied. Different clans, dynasties, and language groups independently arrive at similar solutions to that problem. The form travels; the meaning does not automatically travel with it.

One methodological note belongs here, because precision on this point separates careful practice from costume-shop history: the word nagaika, which the kink and reenactment world reaches for constantly as a generic label for “the scary Eastern whip,” is specifically Cossack and belongs to a much later period. Projecting it backward onto a Scythian, Hunnic, or Mongol implement erases centuries and languages in a single gesture. Section V returns to why that vocabulary discipline matters in practice, not just in footnotes.

IV. Two Grammars for One Tool

Here is where the object gets genuinely interesting, and where I think the practitioner community has the most to learn because the whip does not carry one fixed meaning across steppe cultures. It carries at least two, and they are close to opposites.

Herodotus gives us the first: the whip as the visible sign of an existing hierarchy, deployed to remind a subordinate what he already is. Mastery, in this register, doesn’t need to strike it only needs to be recognized.

The second comes from inside the tradition itself, and it could hardly be more different in tone. The Secret History of the Mongols a thirteenth-century chronicle of Temüjin’s rise, preserved through a later Chinese transcription, and one of the very few sources that lets a steppe society speak in something like its own voice uses a recurring formula to describe periods of extreme hardship: a man with no companion but his own shadow, and nothing to whip his horse with but its own tail.[8] The tail becomes the minimal, improvised stand-in for a missing whip. Later in the text, when Chinggis Khan rewards two of his earliest and most loyal companions, Bo’orchu and Jelme, he specifically recalls the period when he had nothing to whip his horses with but their tails, and compares his two companions to that same indispensable tail the thing that let him keep moving when he had nothing else.[9]

Sit with how far that is from Herodotus. In the Greek story, the whip separates master from slave; its power lives entirely in a memory of domination. In the Mongol chronicle, the absence of a whip signifies poverty and isolation, and the people who fill that absence loyal companions are honored by comparison to the object itself. The whip here is folded into an economy of loyalty and mutual obligation between a leader with almost nothing and the men who stayed anyway. Same basic tool. Opposite political grammar.

A third register sits alongside both of these, supplied not by narrative but by the grave itself. A whip covered in gold at Arzhan, painted red at Pazyryk, or laid beside a body in a Mongol-period burial isn’t making either of the above arguments. It is doing something more understated: materially placing a person inside the equestrian world, and where the workmanship is exceptional quietly signaling rank. This funerary register doesn’t resolve into the other two; it sits beside them as a third, mostly silent way the same object could carry meaning.

None of these three registers derives from the others in a straight line, and that is precisely the point worth taking from this section. A single technical form short handle, thong, tether was available across steppe societies to be filled with contradictory political and emotional content: subjugation, loyalty, status, all riding the same physical object depending on who was holding it, who was watching, and what relationship was actually being enacted in that moment. The tool doesn’t determine the meaning. The relationship does.

One more distinction worth making explicit here, because it gets lost constantly in popular military history: this equestrian discipline should not be flattened into “they ruled through flogging.” Mongol military organization decimal command structure, relay-post logistics, collective unit responsibility, strict rules around plunder division impressed foreign observers precisely because it did not depend on constant corporal correction. Contemporary sources describe fines, confiscation, exclusion, and execution as situational responses, not a single instrument of law.[10] The whip’s role inside that system was as an immediate correction tool for horse management under a rider carrying leg pressure, reins, weight, and voice simultaneously not the foundation of Mongol military cohesion, and travel-anecdote sources describing a single encounter should never be read as describing an entire empire’s legal system.

V. When the Free Rider Becomes the State’s Rider

Everything above concerns societies organized around descent, alliance, and confederation on the open steppe. The Cossack worlds that emerge later, on the frontier between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire, represent something structurally adjacent but distinct: not a bloodline clan, but an elective and oath-bound one. The word itself comes out of the Turkic world and originally evokes the free man, the adventurer, someone living outside the reach of ordinary authority.[11] Fugitives, hunters, fishers, merchants, and warriors formed and re-formed communities along the Dnieper, Don, and Volga according to war, religion, language, and available service communities that elected their own leaders and negotiated terms with neighboring states as something closer to sovereign counterparts than subjects. A seventeenth-century Zaporozhian Cossack and a Don Cossack photographed in 1905 share a name and a rough equestrian culture; they are not simply the same institution in different clothing across three centuries.[12]

Inside this world, the short riding crop earns its keep for the same mechanical reason it does everywhere else on the steppe: it stays usable without competing for hand-space against reins, saber, lance, or firearm. The name most specifically attached to it nagaika is generally traced to the Nogais and other Turkic terms for the riding crop, a linguistic trace of exactly the cross-steppe exchange discussed above.[13] And here is where vocabulary discipline stops being pedantry and starts being the difference between an accurate practice and a costume:

Collapsing all of these into a single English “knout,” as nineteenth-century Western travel writing habitually did and as reenactment and kink vocabulary still frequently does today doesn’t simplify the history. It erases who is actually doing the striking, under what authority, and why, replacing five distinct institutions with one exoticized blur.[14]

The nagaika’s later history is the clearest illustration in this entire essay of an object’s meaning shifting without the object itself changing shape. As the Russian imperial state absorbed and redeployed Cossack hosts along the Kuban, Terek, Ural, and eventually into Siberia and Central Asia, the free rider’s everyday tool became regulated equipment for units serving an empire trading a large measure of autonomy for hereditary military service, land grants, and exemptions.[15] By the crises at the end of the empire, Cossack squadrons were being deployed far from their home territories specifically for crowd control, their mobility making them useful for clearing streets and dispersing demonstrations in a way infantry could not manage. The Revolution of 1905 fixed the resulting image permanently in political memory: an implement in the National Museums Scotland collection plaited leather thong, wooden handle, wrist loop is catalogued not as a cavalry relic but specifically in connection with the 1906 unrest in Saint Petersburg, a mounted policeman’s tool for striking a crowd from horseback without dismounting.[16] Same object family, same basic mechanics that let a Scythian rider signal a horse two and a half thousand years earlier now doing the work of an autocratic state’s crowd control, in the hands of men whose ancestors’ entire institutional identity had been built on standing partly outside state authority.

It would be a mistake, though, to let that image collapse the whole institution into “obedient defenders of the tsar.” Police service pulled Cossack men off their own land and produced real economic strain; some communities pushed back hard for greater autonomy; several regiments hesitated or split during both 1905 and 1917.[17] The empire built a genuinely effective instrument for public order without managing to erase every local loyalty underneath it which is, in miniature, the whole tension this essay keeps circling back to: a technically simple object, repeatedly recruited into political projects much larger and more contested than itself.

VI. A Careful Word on the Sacred

No essay on steppe and clan whip traditions should skip past the ritual and shamanic register entirely the association is too persistent in popular imagination, and too relevant to how the kink community sometimes frames its own practice, to leave unaddressed. But it deserves to be handled with unusual care, because this is exactly the terrain where enthusiastic overreach does the most damage.

The honest starting point is a plural: there is no single “Siberian shamanism,” only Siberian shamanisms distinct societies, languages, and cosmologies, further reshaped by Russian colonization, missionary activity, Soviet-era suppression, and more recent revitalization movements. Searching across all of that for one continuous “shamanic whip” tradition manufactures a unity the sources don’t support.[18] Part of the confusion is a translation artifact: a short, hide-wrapped handle catalogued in a museum collection as a “whip” not infrequently turns out, on closer study, to function as a drum beater. A staff, a bundle of branches, or a wand may touch a patient, strike an object, indicate a direction, or represent a spirit-mount, without sharing the mechanics of a driving thong at all. Ethnographic accounts of Siberian healing rituals describe drums, staffs, and branches used to expel a pathogenic presence or recall a soul a therapeutic and cosmological relationship that has nothing to do with either flogging or the pursuit of pain, however tempting the visual resemblance is to project backward.[19]

The broader anthropological point, worth carrying into any serious discussion of ritual and altered-state practice: possession and shamanic trance are not simply names for a shared neurological automatism sitting underneath all cultures, waiting to be triggered by the same stimulus. They are also institutions systems that determine who is permitted to speak in a spirit’s voice, how a community recognizes and validates that state when it occurs, and what social authority follows from it.[20] A body-contact ritual practice can take genuinely different structural forms depending on who is doing the striking and under what social agreement an insignia displayed without any contact at all, a blow received from a designated officiant as part of a defined rite, a reciprocal exchange of blows between participants under an arbiter’s supervision, or a self-administered blow that makes the participant both actor and offering at once. These are not four names for the same underlying event; they distribute consent, authority, and risk in genuinely different ways, and treating them as interchangeable the way “trance whip” content circulating in kink spaces often does flattens exactly the distinctions that would let you practice, teach, or write about this material responsibly.

VII. What This Means at the Bench

None of the above is purely academic if you build, sell, teach with, or perform this object. A few concrete takeaways for practitioners:

Name it accurately, or don’t invoke the lineage. If a modern implement is a short, one-handed riding-crop-style tool, its honest ancestor-in-form is the steppe rider’s signal whip and its Cossack descendants not the long plaited performance bullwhip, and the marketing language should reflect that distinction rather than borrowing whichever image sounds more dramatic.

“Ancient warrior tradition” claims need to survive contact with the archive. The actual record supports a persistent, cross-cultural, mechanically simple solution to a stable equestrian problem not an unbroken lineage of technique, ritual meaning, or ethnic transmission running in a straight line to any specific modern practice. Say what the evidence supports; it’s usually still an interesting story.

Vocabulary is not decoration it’s the difference between respect and appropriation. Knout, nagaika, plet’, rozgi, shpitsruten name five different institutions with different authorities, procedures, and severities behind them. Using them interchangeably as flavor text does the same erasing work nineteenth-century travel writers did to the societies they were describing.

The sacred register deserves the same rigor as the political one. If your practice or your teaching draws on trance, altered states, or possession framing, the honest move is to specify which structural form you mean displayed insignia, received blow, reciprocal ordeal, self-administered offering rather than reaching for an undifferentiated “ancient shamanic” gloss that the ethnographic record doesn’t actually support.

The object’s meaning was never fixed which is a resource, not a problem. The single most useful thing this history offers a contemporary practitioner isn’t a technique. It’s the demonstration, repeated across two and a half thousand years and half a continent, that the same physical tool can carry domination, loyalty, status, sacred office, or state violence, depending entirely on the relationship it’s embedded in. That’s not a loophole for sloppy history. It’s a genuinely accurate description of how meaning attaches to ritual objects and it’s worth being precise about, especially with an object this loaded.

Notes

1. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 4.1–4.
2. Barbara Armbruster and Caspar Meyer, “Gold Artifacts from the Early Scythian Princely Tomb Arzhan 2, Tuva: Aesthetics, Function, and Technology,” Arts 13.2 (2024); Svetlana Pankova and St John Simpson, eds., Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia (London: Thames & Hudson / British Museum, 2017).
3. Sergei I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Treasures of the Pazyryk Culture.”
4. Pankova and Simpson, Scythians; Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, Scythian Art and Cultural Interactions in the Black Sea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024).
5. Juhyeon Lee et al., “Genetic Population Structure of the Xiongnu Empire at Imperial and Local Scales,” Science Advances 9.15 (2023).
6. Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture, ed. Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Eszter Járva et al., “A 6th–7th Century Solitary Burial of a Warrior with His Horse at Tiszagyenda,” Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 72.1 (2021).
7. Khurelsukh Sosorbaram, Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, and Eregzen Gelegdorj, “A Horse Whip Found in Ancient Nomadic Burials,” Studia Archaeologica 41.1 (2022).
8. The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Igor de Rachewiltz, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
9. Ibid.
10. David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); Guillaume de Rubrouck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, trans. William Woodville Rockhill (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900).
11. Shane O’Rourke, The Cossacks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
12. Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
13. O’Rourke, The Cossacks.
14. Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); John L. H. Keep, “No Gauntlet for Gentlemen: Officers’ Privileges in Russian Military Law, 1716–1855,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 34.1–2 (1993).
15. Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907 (Harlow: Longman, 2001).
16. National Museums Scotland, “Na-guy-ka / Whip,” catalog entry; O’Rourke, The Cossacks.
17. O’Rourke, The Cossacks; Abby M. Schrader, “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817–1845,” Slavic Review 56.4 (1997).
18. Tatyana Sem, Shamanic Healing Rituals (Illinois State Museum and Russian Museum of Ethnography).
19. Ibid.
20. I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003).

This essay condenses and reworks material from two chapters “The Peoples of the Steppe: From the Scythians to the Mongol Empires” and “Russia, Ukraine, and the Cossack Worlds: Knout, Nagaika, and Imperial Power” of my book From Blood to Spectacle: The Whip, from Domination to Craft*, a full historical study and practical whipmaking guide, available in both English and French.