Re: SCA is different things to different people (fwd)

[clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)]

Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

Tristan de Roquelaure:

> ><snip>
> >>  That's where the problem lies with the SCA, I think -- a lot of people,
> >>  when it comes to the social and cultural history aspect, don't know what to
> >>  read, don't know which scholar's work is considered by professional
> >>  historians to be the best available, who's work has been disproved or
> >>  discounted, etc.  That is *not* a mean comment, just a simple fact.<snip> 
> 
> Who WOULD be good to read from?

It depends upon where and when you're interested in looking. Over
the course of even a hundred years, styles and fads changed in
most countries. I doubt, for example, that anyone who was making
a living as a minstrel in northern France in the 1090's, singing
the same old blood and thunder gestes of Charlemagne and his
knights, would have imagined that no more than fifty years later,
he'd have had no patronage whatsoever, having been replaced by
minstrels who sang of Arthur-after all, Charlemagne et al. had
been the only literary fodder these men had enjoyed since time
out of mind!

One of the problems which people frequently face when trying to
get started in mediaeval research is the "mediaeval monolith"-the
idea that very little changed over the course of the Middle
Ages-a myth promulgated by a variety of thinkers, starting in the
18th century, with such fond descriptions of the Middle Ages as
"one thousand years without a bath." 
-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
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