Dr. Michael Cramer's book, "Medieval Fantasy as Performance"

Readers of this blog who have a serious interest in popular historical re-enactment and re-creation, the history of roleplaying, or the SCA might be interested in this note from Michael Cramer. I've seen an earlier version of this work and it is worth your consideration.

This is the first announcement that my new book, Medieval Fantasy as Performance: The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages, has gone to press and will be available beginning in January from Scarecrow Press.

The SCA is an international organization of medievalists--some academic, some romantic, and some fantastic--who act out their fantasies by adopting medieval persona and interacting with one another at tournaments, wars, feasts, and other festivals, as well as numerous workshops and seminars. Much more than a Live Action Role Playing Game, the SCA is a community of like minded individuals, a group of nearly 100,000 Don Quixotes playing a communal game of make believe. Through the prism of performance studies this book seeks to examine why and how the SCA performs its medieval fantasy, and comes to the conclusion that what the SCA has created, and for more or less the same reasons, is an accidental reconstruction of the medieval King Game.

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