51–60 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly why do people dress up as pirates and Vikings for Halloween? We're talking about gangs of armed robbers who engaged in rape, pillage, murder, and slaving.
They aren't dressing up as actual pirates and vikings, they're dressing up as fictional archetypes inspired by stuff like Pirates of the Caribbean and How to Train Your Dragon. Halloween pirates are as different from real pirates as Star Wars Stormtroopers are from real-life stormtroopers.
Since 1963. The Byrds attended the first series of renfaires. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AFlBoxsAkI#ren https://www.amazon.com/Well-Met-Renaissance-American-Counter...
1500s samurais popularized a pasttime of reenacting 1300s samurais. Except, being Japan, they had actual relics of the period in pristine condition.
I know someone in the SCA who portrays a 1500s samurai who portrays a 1300s samurai - giving him two periods of costume to play with, without "changing persona" at all. Kinda.
I went down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia about turkeys. Am I understanding it correctly in that turkeys went from South America to Europe then to North America? So it's native to the new world, but not native to North America? Anyway, 1500s is when they came to Europe, so maybe they did enjoy a good turkey leg...
That is incorrect. Both extant species of turkeys are native to North America.
Where is the article? I'm getting something about Kevin Kostner's The West. Nothing about renaissance fairs.
Last weekend I went to my local ren faire. What a fantastic time. If you havent been to one before, definitely go. At mine, I'd say 70% of people are in a costume of some kind. 95% of the costumes were period correct or related. I went in star trek blue. My favourite response a lady tells me that I'm violating the temporal prime directive for being in uniform. That was hilarious! Note, I was literally the only person…
The Ren Faire in NY has a time traveller day. Trekies abound.
What interests me is why humans crave this one time in history (medieval?). It’s old enough to be different than now but not old enough to be like caveman times? Lower technology than now but not no technology. Do people in other countries that aren’t western civilization have similar cravings for that era or an era like it?
Renaissance fairs don’t really exist in Europe. Most countries have their own traditional festivals and customs which date back to that time period.
What interests me is why humans crave this one time in history (medieval?). It’s old enough to be different than now but not old enough to be like caveman times? Lower technology than now but not no technology. Do people in other countries that aren’t western civilization have similar cravings for that era or an era like it?
first off, as a ren fest veteran, it's easier to just take "renaissance" to mean "basically any time between the collapse of rome and world war i, also with the possibility of time travellers and things that never existed in the first place and anachronisms like turkeys in pre-Colombian England" and take "Renaissance" with the capital "r" to mean "from the 1300s to roughly the discovery of the new world" Second, I th…
I think it's mostly a case of the printing press solidifying all that cultural mythology right around the tail end of the Renaissance. King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable was an especially popular theme among early printed fiction (think mass market paperbacks of today) which is where I think most of this began. The motifs introduced in those books have been pervasive since the common people started learning how to read and evolved into a lot of different cultural features like renfairs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renaissance fairs don’t really exist in Europe. Most countries have their own traditional festivals and customs which date back to that time period.
At least here in Spain we do have medieval markets not tied to a specific festivity. Not sure how much they resemble American ren fairs, but they tend to have falconry exhibitions, smiths forging stuff, sellers of wooden toys and artisan jewelry..
What interests me is why humans crave this one time in history (medieval?). It’s old enough to be different than now but not old enough to be like caveman times? Lower technology than now but not no technology. Do people in other countries that aren’t western civilization have similar cravings for that era or an era like it?