Medieval Fantasy As Performance

In this book, Michael Cramer views the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an organization that studies and recreates the middle ages, as a case study for a growing fascination with medieval fantasy in popular culture. He explores the act of medieval re-creation as performance by focusing on the SCA, describing the group's activities, investigating its place in popular culture, and looking at the SCA not so much as a historical society but as an on-going work of performance art; a postmodern counter-culture riff on what it means to be "medieval." Cramer examines the group's activities, from persona and character development to theatrical performance and personal interaction; from the complex official ceremonies to full contact armored combat with mock broadswords. He explores the SCA in detail to discover how its members adapt and employ ideas about the Middle Ages in performance, ritual reenactment, living history, and re-creation, analyzing the performance of identity through ritual, sport, drama, and personal interaction, and he focuses on the reconstruction of the medieval "king game," a game in which a mock king is chosen to reign over a mock court. The book also studies various ideas about medievalism, including the contrast between reenactment and re-creation, and places these activities in the context of contemporary American society. With three appendixes, a bibliography, and a selection of photos, Cramer demonstrates how and why medieval fantasy is increasingly used in popular culture and analyzes the dissatisfaction with contemporary culture that leads people into these realms of fantasy.

This look at the colorful and complex history of cosplay and fandom fashion examines the relationship between franchises and the cosplayers they inspire and the technology that helps bring the details of costumes to life.

This abundantly illustrated book is an illuminating exploration of the impact of medieval imagery on three hundred years of visual culture. From the soaring castles of Sleeping Beauty to the bloody battles of Game of Thrones, from Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings to mythical beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, and from Medieval Times to the Renaissance Faire, the Middle Ages have inspired artists, playwrights, filmmakers, gamers, and writers for centuries. Indeed, no other historical era has captured the imaginations of so many creators. This volume aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so flexible—and applicable—to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These “medieval” worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars. This title is published to accompany an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21–September 11, 2022.

In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

An accessibly-written survey of the origins and growth of the discipline of medievalism studies.

We frequently engage with that which we consciously perceive not to be real, yet fantasy, despite its pervasive presence and strong role in everyday life through its connection to identities, communities, desires, and meanings, has yet to be properly defined and researched. This book examines fantasy from a performance theory perspective. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature, it presents ethnographic and art-based research on live action role-playing games to explore fantasy as a bodily and negotiated phenomenon that involves various kinds of engagement with one’s surroundings. Overall, this book is a study of various forms and roles that fantasy can take on as part of contemporary Western culture. The study suggests that fantasy emerges as a different type of interpretation of normalised performance and reality, and can thus provide individuals with the tools to wield agency in everyday life. The book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, literature and performance studies.

The United States of Medievalism contemplates the desires, dreams, and contradictions inherent in experiencing the Middle Ages in a nation that is so temporally, spatially, and at times politically removed from them. The European Middle Ages have long influenced the national landscape of the United States through the medieval sites that permeate its self-announced republican landscapes and cities. Today, American-built medievalisms continue to shape the nation’s communities, collapsing the binaries between past and present, medieval and modern, European and American. The volume’s chapters visit the nation’s many medieval-inspired spaces, from Sherwood Forest in Texas to California’s San Andreas Fault. Stops are made in New York City’s churches, Boston’s gardens, Philadelphia’s Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, Appalachian highways, Minnesota’s Viking Villages, New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, and the Las Vegas Strip. As the editors and their fellow essayists take the reader on this cross-country trip across the United States, they ponder the cultural work done by the nation’s medievalized spaces. In its exploration of a seemingly distant period, this collection challenges the underexamined legacy of medievalism on the western side of the Atlantic. Full of intriguing case studies and reflections, this book is informative reading for anyone interested in the contemporary vestiges of the Middle Ages.

An introduction to medievalism offering a balance of accessibility and sophistication, with comprehensive overviews as well as detailed case studies.