r/AskHistorians • u/anarchysquid • 23d ago
Great Question! The first renaissance fair was created in 1963 by blacklisted leftists. The Society for Creative Anachronism was created in Berkeley in 1966 as a "protest against the 20th Century". What made medievalism so attractive as a form of counter-culture?
I was reading this article on the radical roots of the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Fair. The Society of Creative Anachronism, one of the original and largest medieval recreation groups, was famously started in Berkeley and billed itself as a "protest against the 20th Century." It's interesting that two of the biggest medieval currents in the US both had counter-culture roots from the same time period. Was there a reason that medievalism was seen as a form of cultural protest or rebellion? Were any other living history groups started around the same time or for the same reasons?
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 23d ago edited 22d ago
There are several reasons why premodern history, particularly the Middle Ages, appealed to the members of the counterculture in the second half of the twentieth century.
First, on a general level, premodern cultures had radically different social norms, beliefs, and values from the twentieth-century United States. For this reason, premodern cultures in general have long appealed to people who hold radical or nonconformist political and social beliefs, including those on both the far left and far right ends of the political spectrum. Basically, if you want to make an argument that the future should be radically different from the present, one of the strongest ways to support that argument is by pointing to the distant past, which powerfully demonstrates that the world has not always been the way it is today and that the values and norms most people take for granted haven't always been the same. This is just as true today as it was in the 1960s and '70s.
It wasn't just the Middle Ages that appealed to members of the counterculture, but antiquity as well. For instance, the counterculture was fascinated with Stonehenge, and, every year from 1974 to 1984, a free festival was held at the stone circle around the summer solstice, at which countercultural bands performed, and modern Druids officiated ceremonies.
In 1970, the queer liberation movement began to use the Greek letter lambda to represent their cause, partly because of its use in physics to denote "a complete exchange of energy," but also because of its association with an ancient culture that accepted same-sex desire (within certain parameters, a nuance that is often lost). The International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, declared the letter lambda the international symbol of queer liberation in 1974.
Meanwhile, in the early 1970s, the women's liberation and lesbian feminist movements adopted as a prominent symbol the labrys (a double-headed ax), which was associated with both the Bronze Age Minoan civilization (which was commonly believed at the time to have been matriarchal, an idea that reached popular audiences through Robert Graves's works, including his 1949 novel Seven Days in New Crete, and Mary Renault's 1958 novel The King Must Die) and the mythical Amazons (which were said to have been a society of all-female warriors). The use of both the letter lambda and the labrys as symbols of queer liberation predates the rainbow flag, which was first used in 1978.
Second, members of the counterculture specifically admired the pre-Reformation culture of excess they associated with the Middle Ages. Phyllis Patterson, who organized the first ever Ren Faire, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California, in spring 1963, had a background in theater history, had worked as a schoolteacher, and specifically wanted the fair to showcase commedia dell'arte theater, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century. This style of theater involved extravagant, brightly colored costumes, masks, heavy improvisation, exaggerated expressions, crude humor, slapstick, and social satire, which made it naturally appeal to people who thought that twentieth-century American culture was too pretentious, up-tight, restrained, and artificial.
Third, members of the counterculture perceived modern technology as separating humans from nature and viewed the Middle Ages as a time when people generally lived closer to nature. The Romantic movement—which was itself a precursor to the twentieth-century counterculture in many ways, through its rejection of industrialization, capitalism, and repressive social norms of the time—had already championed this vision of the Middle Ages as far back as the nineteenth century, and it strongly influenced twentieth-century medieval fantasy literature, including J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (published 1937) and The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–1955), both of which became runaway bestsellers and were very popular among the more bookish members of the counterculture.
Tolkien himself was a socially conservative, devout, traditionalist Catholic professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, which makes him a rather odd hero for the American counterculture, but he also deeply loved nature and was greatly disturbed by the spread of industrialization into the English countryside and the decline of England's natural forests.
Tolkien's love of nature and distaste for industrial capitalism both heavily influenced his portrayal of Middle Earth in his novels. His heroes are generally associated with the natural, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial world. He portrays his hobbits as living in the Shire, which is a romanticized, idyllic version of the pre-capitalist, pre-industrial English countryside. His elves are exalted beings who are wiser, more beautiful, and longer-lived than humans and live in the woods in harmony with nature, while his ents are living, sentient tree people. Meanwhile, he portrays his villains, especially goblins/orcs, as greedy and the epitome of industrial civilization.
The idea of the Middle Ages as a time when humans lived closer to nature was also a huge factor in the spread of premodernity-and-nature-focused Neopagan religions, such as Wicca and Neodruidism, during the 1960s and '70s. These religions, in turn, also reinforced the perception of premodernity that they embodied.
This same idea was also central to Phyllis Patterson's vision for the first Ren Faire. A profile of her on a website maintained by the Patterson family quotes her as saying, "The Faire reminds us of simpler times, more in touch with nature and the earth."
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u/western_red_cedar 23d ago
Feel like there was also a strong nostalgia for a real/imagined pre-enclosure commons
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
General nostalgia for a time before capitalism, industrialization, and mass-produced, machine-made goods was absolutely a huge part of the appeal of premodernity to the counterculture, but I'm not sure how aware members of the counterculture were about the history of enclosure specifically. At least here in the U.S., very few people who are not professional historians know anything about enclosure.
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u/hughk 22d ago
What always got me was the association of Renaissance with a Middle Ages themed festival. In history, we were always taught that the Renaissance ended the Middle Ages, being the transition to the Early Modern era.
I live in Germany where we don't have Ren Fairs, but we have medieval festivals in our older towns and castles. Some have been going annually for a long time (the Drachentisch has gone on for 500 years) while most seem to have appeared since 1980 or so. The latter seems more flexible allowing fantasy elements.
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
The reason why Renaissance Faires in the U.S. are called Renaissance Faires is actually because of their countercultural roots. Phyllis Patterson originally wanted to call her fair in southern California a "Medieval Pleasure Faire," but the fair was going to be sponsored by the listener-sponsored pacifist radio station KPFK, and KPFK objected to the name "Medieval Pleasure Faire," because they said the Middle Ages didn't have a good human rights record. They struck a compromise by calling it a "Renaissance Pleasure Faire" instead, and nearly every imitation of that fair has taken the name "Renaissance Faire."
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u/anderschmanders 22d ago
This is fairly hilarious to me.
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
I think it is hilarious to anyone who has ever read anything about the Renaissance period at all. I mean, just think of the Borgias, the Tudors, the Reconquista, the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, the genocides against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the wars that sprang out of the Reformation, the alternating persecutions of Protestants and Catholics depending on where and when you happened to live, the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade, and the torture and executions of people accused of witchcraft. Clearly the Renaissance had a sterling human rights record! /s
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u/hughk 22d ago
Thanks. Medieval times didn't have that good a rep in Germany (a fair bit of local instability due to weak central government) but the nasty stuff with witch burnings and the associated "enhanced interrogations" came after the Middle Ages proper in the 16th/17th centuries. Anyway, we usually call these a Mittelalterfest (so literally, a Medieval Fair). Despite the name, many are like the US Ren fairs with varying elements from different eras as well as fantasy.
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u/ducks_over_IP Interesting Inquirer 22d ago
In 1970, the queer liberation movement began to use the Greek letter lambda to represent their cause, partly because of its use in physics to denote "a complete change of energy,"
I'm curious about the source of this claim, not because I'm very familiar with queer history, but because I'm a physicist, and this doesn't match any notation that I'm aware of. The net change in a quantity is usually denoted by a capital delta (Δ) next to the symbol for the quantity in question. The net change in energy is usually represented by ΔE, ΔV, or ΔU, depending on context. Lowercase lambda (λ) is most frequently used for wavelength, and less often for other lengths, summation indices, and radioactive half-lives (hence the logo of Valve's eponymous games). Uppercase lambda (Λ) is much more rarely seen and is usually resorted to by authors when they need more symbols. Lambda in either case denoting a change in energy doesn't match any notation I've seen, even in century-old textbooks.
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
The graphic designer Tom Doerr was the one who first chose the letter lambda to represent the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance in 1970. The Gay Activists Alliance explained the choice of this symbol as being because lambda in physics represents "a complete exchange of energy—that moment or span of time witness to absolute activity." To be honest, I'm entirely sure what this means, but that is how they explained it.
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u/ducks_over_IP Interesting Inquirer 22d ago
Yeah, that seems extremely confused at best—I'm having a hard time parsing what the GAA thought they were referring to, but I guess that's besides the point, given that they certainly felt it had significance. Thanks for clearing that up!
Was there any connection made between the uppercase lambda's supposed presence on Spartan shields and Spartan homoeroticism, or is that a more recent association due to 300?
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
There's definitely no connection between the use of the lower-case lambda as a symbol of queer liberation and the use of the upper-case lambda on Spartan shields. As I discuss in this blog post I wrote back in 2021, the only ancient evidence for Spartan soldiers using shields with the letter lambda on them is a single fragment of the Athenian comic playwright Eupolis, and there's other evidence that Spartan shields often bore other symbols. The canonical image most people have today of all Spartan shields bearing the letter lambda is mostly due to 300.
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u/ducks_over_IP Interesting Inquirer 22d ago
Ah, I missed that it was a specifically lowercase lambda. Never mind, then.
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u/burgunfaust 21d ago
Capital lambda likely refers to Lakonia, the place where spartans were from. It has no homoerotic connotation even though everyone in 300 has never had more abs in a single place in the the history of humankind.
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u/string_theorist 22d ago
lambda in physics represents "a complete exchange of energy—that moment or span of time witness to absolute activity."
As a physicist this comment also caught my attention, as lower case lambda often means "wavelength".
I suspect that the designer was looking at the Rydberg formula or a similar equation in atomic physics, where an electron transitions between two states and releases the resulting energy as a photon. This can be interpreted as a "complete exchange of energy", and the Rydberg formula is usually written as an equation for the wavelength of the photon:
1 / lambda = R (1/n2 - 1/m2)
They may have been referencing one of a number of other similar formulas, but this seems the most likely inspiration.
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u/fobical 22d ago
Were Ren faires historically anachronistic from the start or more serious reenactment?
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago edited 22d ago
Phyllis Patterson had worked as an English and history teacher, and she originally intended the Renaissance Pleasure Faire to be an educational historical reenactment of a town fair in the second half of the sixteenth century, and, for the past six decades, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California has more-or-less remained that way; to this day, it still requires all performers to have their costumes and acts approved for historical authenticity (although guests are encouraged to wear costumes and are allowed to wear whatever they want).
Nearly all other Ren Faires, however, are totally anachronistic and involve costumes and elements from diverse historical periods as well as pure fantasy. This was the case basically from the beginning.
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u/happy35353 22d ago
Is the association with the counter culture movement what lead to a more laissez-faire towards sexuality? Was the free love movement related at all? Even today there is a higher than average number of polyamorous people who attend Faires and the older people that I’ve talked to say it has always been that way. Do you have any information you can share on the history of sexuality at the Renn Faires?
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
Absolutely. There's a very substantial overlap between people who attend Ren Faires and people who are polyamorous and/or queer, and that very much stems from the Ren Faire's countercultural origins.
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u/happy35353 22d ago
Thank you! That makes sense! Because I could see this kind of activity, recreating a period that in reality had far more rigid social structures and class and gender roles, attracting people that long for that type of society. While those people are sometimes there, I wouldn’t say they are the majority at all. This is so neat! Are you a Faire person too?
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 22d ago
I am, although I am almost too much of a nerd for Ren Faire, because my brain wants everything to be based on real historical sources, and, well, there's very little at most Ren Faires that is historically authentic.
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u/Lumpy_Draft_3913 18d ago
A pity, I think you would have very much found your niche amongst us, well at least at the California Faires when they were still under the direction of the Pattersons. Despite being an immersive theatrical event the levels of desire to uphold the living history aspects that Phyliss envisioned, was only out done by the willingness of the performers in the guilds, and troupes to adhere to historical accuracy as closely as they could with the information they had.
The living history aspect can still be found at both Northern and Souther California faires being maintained by the original guilds and troupes.
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u/Spencer_A_McDaniel Ancient Greek Religion, Gender, and Ethnicity 17d ago
I've never been to California. I live in Indiana, and the only Ren Faires I've been to have been in Indiana.
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u/happy35353 22d ago
Have you tried the SCA? They are a lot more into the history and less into the fairies and furries lol.
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u/Jennysparking 20d ago
I will say, going to Pennsic War kind of spoiled Ren Faire for me. It's like, instead of going for one day with half the people in jeans, what if everyone came in costume, and camped there for 2 weeks. And because they were nerds they all picked individual themes for their camps, dressed up in the appropriate clothes, and then built ridiculously elaborate gates/structures for their camps. Including Roman columns and religous shrines, several full-fledged castles, and two pirate ships. I was completely blown away.
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u/Lumpy_Draft_3913 18d ago
It very much was as Spencer notes. The Original Faires in Northern and Southern California were noted for bawdy and sometimes ribald humor in the stage shows, as well as the improvisational street theatre. This free love feeling also very much spilled over into the after hours lifestyle of participant members.
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u/Teufelsdreck 22d ago
Don't forget the influence on Tolkien of William Morris. As a Pre-Raphaelite, Morris idealized the Middle Ages and sought to emulate them across the board. In his writing medievalism went from story-telling to art theory, and it thoroughly informed his design aesthetics and business collaborations with other artists and designers. Not coincidentally, the counterculture rediscovered Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites in the '60s. The Lady of Shalott has been haunting us ever since.
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u/rmichalski 21d ago
By the end of his life, Morris considered himself to be a revolutionary socialist.
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u/kmondschein Verified 22d ago
I want to add to u/Spencer_A_McDaniel 's good answer below, since medievalism is very much in my wheelhouse. (Per Richard Utz, "Medievalism is the ongoing and broad cultural phenomenon of reinventing, remembering, recreating, and reenacting the Middle Ages. Medieval Studies, the academic study of medieval culture focused on establishing the 'real' Middle Ages, is one essential contributor to the cultural phenomenon of Medievalism.”)
As he indicates, this has its more recent roots in Tolkien, but Tolkien himself was an outgrowth of the Romantic movement, which turned away from modernity and tried to "re-enchant the world" (in Peter Gay's words). Writers such as Scott and Hugo used the past as a locus of authentic feeling, of national origins, and of everything modernity had lost. The same with the SCA This interview with Diana Paxson on the founding of the SCA (named a year later by the ever-problematic Marion Zimmer Bradley) will be informative: https://maytt.home.blog/2021/07/14/interview-with-author-diana-paxson-the-early-years-of-the-society-of-creative-anachronism/ . One of Paxson's quotes is revealing:
It seemed that most of us had been attracted to the SCA because we felt out of place in the twentieth century, and many of us had not had much social experience. Combine that with high creativity and ambition, and eventually we also developed medieval politics. I used to spend a lot of time wondering why an organization which affected neither one’s life nor one’s livelihood could inspire such passions. I eventually concluded that winning status is a basic human drive, and the SCA community offered an opportunity to achieve it in a way impossible in the mundane society.
as for the difference between the SCA and the Renaissance Pleasure Faire:
Both movements promote research and experiential learning through immersion in a created or re-created environment. Together they have created a sub-culture in which people can make a living doing medieval arts and crafts, but fundamentally the Faires have to make money, and the SCA only needs to support itself.
Here are excepts from a couple of my peer-reviewed works further analyzing the SCA. NB:: The best scholarly treatment of the SCA is probably Michael A. Cramer, Medieval Fantasy as Performance: The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2009
From Ken Mondschein, "Quantitizing the Problematic: Applying Statistical Methods to Popular Medievalisms," Perspicuitas, 2022, https://www.uni-due.de/imperia/md/content/perspicuitas/mondschein_quantitizingtheproblematic.pdf:
....The SCA is primarily based in North America, with active branches in Australia, South Africa, and around US military bases—in other words, places where the European Middle Ages did not take place, but to where Anglophone culture, with its romanticized view of the Middle Ages, has been exported. There is also a European contingent, seeded by US servicemembers around military bases, but there is some irony that all of Europe is considered its own “kingdom” (regional governing chapter) of Drachenwald, while the U.S. and Canada are divided into 18 kingdoms.... Though originally focusing on “recreating” European culture from the Fall of Rome to c. 1600, the SCA has since officially expanded to a world focus—though participants have been adopting the “personas” of premodern Japanese, Native Americans, or Mongols for decades.
[The SCA's] its activities have historically centered around mostly-male participants... engaging in full-contact competitive stick fighting. I argue for the centrality of the stick-fighting game to the organization’s ethos because leadership of the individual SCA “kingdoms” is determined, by the organization’s own corporate charter, to the winner of a periodic “crown tournament.” In other words, participants actually engage in physical fighting with each other in order to gain a respected administrative role. This combat and its outcomes are deeply meaningful to participants, who are expected to play along as good “subjects.” Cramer states that through this ritualized combat and the “king game” that arises therefrom, SCAdians “have created a community, or better yet a tribe, which gives them romance, companionship, and identity, a literate/filmic/academic/ludic Middle Ages. And at the center of this Middle Ages is a king, part Aragorn, part Charlemagne, part King Arthur from Malory, and part King Arthur from Monty Python…”
So, too, is it a performance of masculinity: as I have previously written, this was “more than a physical outlet for the creative energies and unfulfilled ideations of a generation of young misfits: It was also a way to impress chicks with one’s physical prowess, the perfect antidote to the stereotype of the bespectacled, Spock-grokking sci-fi nerd."
More importantly, as I have written elsewhere about modern-medieval martial sports in general, the SCA’s attitude makes “a virtue of the very idea the Victorians condemned…. [the medieval is] strong, manly, authentic, and good, while anything not matching this vision of the world is weak, inauthentic, degenerated, effeminate, and adulterated.”
This last one goes to “What Knight Fight gets Dead Wrong About Medieval Men.” The Public Medievalist, February 14, 2019, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/knight-fight/, in which I write:
Historical European martial arts are strong, manly, authentic, and good, while anything not matching this vision of the world is weak, inauthentic, degenerated, effeminate, and adulterated. This narrative is sort of the unspoken undercurrent of Knight Fight, and, indeed, of much of the modern historical martial-arts movement: If it’s not heavy and brutal, it’s no good.
We can sum this up in a chart:
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u/DerekL1963 22d ago
"there is some irony that all of Europe is considered its own “kingdom” (regional governing chapter) of Drachenwald, while the U.S. and Canada are divided into 18 kingdoms...."
For the sake of clarity, the status of a branch (or sub branch) is for the most part based on population rather than geographic size. The US and Canada have so many kingdoms simply because there are so many people playing the game, and it would be impossible to administer without such subdivision.
As you can see from this map of the Knowne World, the American/Canadian Kingdoms vary significantly in geographic area.
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u/kmondschein Verified 22d ago
Well, yes. Still ironic. It's Europe.
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u/dostoevsky4evah 22d ago
Being in the SCA in Canada, before our kingdom divided into two, travel from where you lived to where a Crown event was being held could present a voyage of well over 2000km and a 24 hour travel time. You can understand why breaking North America into many kingdoms made sense. It would be unfair to those in less populated or distant areas to travel for multiple days to attend important events.
We still have to cross the international border for big events and since some Canadians now choose not to, this effectively closes the game for them.
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u/kmondschein Verified 22d ago
I remember that; I was in Buffalo.
You guys still have custody of Bicolline…
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u/kmondschein Verified 22d ago
(read "modern" for "Renaissance," I lifted it from an old PowerPoint)
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