| What happens when adults play make believe? What does it mean to be "medieval" in postmodern times? How does one perform "medievalness" in the Twenty-first century? With so many different impressions of the Middle Ages coming to us from the academy and from popular culture, what is the best way to convey impressions of the Middle Ages. Should we stick to scholarly interpretations, many of them too esoteric for the layperson? Or, conversely, is it better to employ popular images of what it means to be "medieval," handed down to us from the Victorians and filtered through the lens of Hollywood and the pens of writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Marion Zimmer Bradley and C. S. Lewis? There is no doubt what Marcellus Wallace means in Pulp Fiction when he says "I'm going to get medieval on your ass," but how truly medieval is the image he draws?;This dissertation shall examine how ideas about the Middle Ages are adapted and employed in performance in ritual re-enactment, living history, and re-creation within the Society for Creative Anachronism, a non-profit medieval re-creation group. By looking at various ideas about medievalism, as well as contrasting medieval re-enactment and living history with medieval re-creation as performance genres, the performance of identity through ritual, sport, drama, and personal interaction, are analyzed with the goal of showing how SCA members, rather then reenacting the Middle Ages, have used performance and theatricality to construct a postmodern counter culture that is framed as medieval and is centered around a re-construction of the medieval king game. |
