Last Thursday, Noah Goldman closed the visor on his steel helmet and straightened his body for the blow he was about to receive from his teacher's sword. It was the first practice of the season for the Boston-area Schola Saint George Western martial arts study group, and Goldman needed to christen his new headgear.

Group Leader Charles Deily pulled the wooden sword back and slammed it into Goldman's head. The crash reverberated through the empty, white walled Watertown gymnasium. "Have you hit me yet?" Goldman joked. Deily delivered a few more blows until he became worried that he'd split his sword.

"That's why we call them wasters," said Jarkko Hietaniemi, a Finnish Schola student, referring to the familiar term for the heavy wooden long swords.

Goldman opened his helmet and examined his cell phone. While being struck in the head, he had received a phone call from his mother. "She'll want to know if I got hit in the head," he said. "I'm going to tell her I got hit in the head a lot."

Schola Saint George began in Dallas, Texas in the early nineties, when Brian R. Price began teaching a particular style of medieval Italian martial arts. (Price, who also forges reproduction arms, has since been inducted into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame.) But its origins begin much earlier, in fifteenth century Italy, with a sword master named Fiore dei Liberi.

In 1410, Fiore, as he is called, composed a brilliant and enigmatic illustrated manuscript known as Fior di Battaglia -- "The Flower of Battle." The text illustrates a variety of fighting maneuvers, or "plays," appropriate for armed and unarmed combat. Accompanying each image is a rhyming verse describing the action. These verses are allusive and occasionally funny, and Fiore gave his plays evocative names, basing them around a system of four animals and their attributes. (This should be familiar to anyone who has seen an Eastern martial arts movie -- Chinese martial arts uses a system of five animals.) The couplets, the names, and the animals are mnemonic devices, designed to help the combatant remember what to do in the heat of battle.

Fiore's text became the basis of Italian swordsmanship throughout the fifteenth century, and it still guides the Schola Saint George. But modern practitioners are at a disadvantage: they are not part of an unbroken tradition of interpretation. Members of the Schola have had to start from scratch, piecing together from all those allusions, written in extremely idiomatic Italian, an entire system of martial arts that had not been practiced for hundreds of years.

How do you make sense of a passage like this, for instance:

This partido (division/finish) I will do, with my foot in your bollocks, I do it to cause you pain, and to make you loose the cover. Because this play has to be done immediately, not to have doubts against it. (From Recto 26, translated by Eleonora Litta & Matt Easton)

Okay, that one might not be the best example.

Deborah Barolsky, Deily's wife, put the problem of interpretation succinctly. "Fiore leaves a lot unsaid," she explained. "Imagine if you were writing a textbook about soccer. You wouldn't explain how to dribble a soccer ball. You would just say dribble." Just as these days everybody knows how to dribble a ball, in medieval Italy, everybody knew how to handle a sword. It's up to the Schola to figure out the swordfighting equivalent of not kicking the ball with your toe.

So, the Schola constantly refines its techniques, replacing poor interpretations with better ones as they come along. For some, this process is frustrating -- a turnoff. For others, like Deily, it is half the fun. The best part of trying new moves, Deily said, is that "you know it works when all of a sudden you are like, 'Woah! That motion is terribly efficient.'"

Beginners won't know that thrill of discovery until later. (They can also put off the purchase of a big metal helmet for a while.) The early training sessions focus almost entirely on footwork, posture, and hand movements. As Deily explained, "You want to make sure people are safe before you give them big, heavy wooden things." Nonetheless, at the end of the sessions, Deily, a patient teacher with a way of being opinionated without being pushy, lets students get their hands on the weapons. It keeps them coming back.

Ariel Friedlander, a newcomer to the group, grew up in London, where she would visit the Victoria and Albert Museum and admire the armaments. As she left Thursday's practice, she confessed, "I'm glad to be able to go home and say I had the sword in my hand." For Friedlander, joining the Schola is a kind of revenge against her childhood, where the boys would always play King Arthur, and the girls would wait to be rescued. Soon, she will be the one with the sword. Plus, it's good exercise, and you don't get a pair of metal gauntlets when you go to the gym.

Goldman, a compact, excitable man and an attentive student, also loves the equipment. In addition to his helmet, he owns several swords and a pair of pointed soft leather medieval shoes, tied at the sides with leather strips. ("We wear the shoes because it helps with the footwork," Deily, who also has a pair, stressed. "Not because we want to look like elves or something.") Goldman's friends rank on him for his interests and his gear, but, he explained, "It's not about whether I can go out on the street and do this and that." Nonetheless, "It's embarrassing when your friend takes a sword off your wall, and you disarm him, just like that."

Deily thinks that Western martial arts are poised at the brink of widespread acceptance. He likened the position of groups like the Schola to Asian martial arts dojos in the fifties and sixties -- when Kung Fu movies hastened a boom in enrollment. Western martial arts now has its own competitions, belt ranking system ("A silly analog" to Judo belts, Deily confessed, that gives students "a nice, clearly defined set of skills that [they are] working toward."), and different styles to suit different temperaments. If Italian martial arts doesn't do it for you, there is a German martial arts group based at the Higgins Armory in Worcester.

And the benefits are similar. From what Bostonist saw, the Schola offers a great workout, both intellectual and physical, in an encouraging environment. You do have to keep on your toes at the Schola; you never know when one of Deily and Barolsky's two young girls, aspiring sword masters, will launch a sneak attack.

But, then again, it's easy to keep on your toes when you are wearing elf shoes.

Schola Saint George holds beginner practices Thursdays at 6:15. There is a $10 floor fee. Contact Charles Deily for more details.