October 11, 2025 • 16 mins
(Host: Lucy)
Giant turkey legs, fried food, implausible costumes… and counterculture? This episode explores the roots of Renaissance Faires in the US, and how this originally hippie-centric phenomenon was linked to other forms of medievalism in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Communes, folk music, particolored tights, and a reimagined past turn out to be more closely linked than you might imagine. This episode also examines how Ren Faires have evolved and continued to thrive, and why you still — if you’re lucky — might hear Steeleye Span covers at your nearest one.
For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Today, the Renaissance Faire is a seasonal staple of nerd culture: from the long evenings of summer
to the brisk afternoons of fall, we gather and make merry. But how did the Ren Faire get started?
(00:23):
Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I will be discussing
the wild and wonderful history of the Renaissance Faire. For a maximally atmospheric listening
experience, please know that I am spelling Faire with an -e every time. I’m discussing
this phenomenon as someone who has attended and even performed at Renaissance Faires. And yes,
(00:47):
I own multiple costumes. But also, as a medievalist, I am acutely aware of how
the Ren Faire as we know and love it is almost entirely decoupled from… any actual Renaissance
history at all. And this led me to examine the Ren Faire as a phenomenon with a history all its own.
Before I go any further, I should clarify that in this episode, I’m discussing the Renaissance
(01:12):
Faire as a specifically US-American phenomenon. This is not to say that similar fairs don’t take
place elsewhere, but… they’re different. For one thing, the place where you go and people
dress up and there are musical gigs and sellers of food and fun little crafts in Germany is called,
not a Renaissance Faire, but a medieval market. Also, in Germany, you’re much more likely to hear
(01:36):
actual medieval music than folk covers. And to be at a medieval castle. The phenomenon in
Denmark — also with vendors and jousting and all the fun of the fair — is also called ‘medieval.’
If you want more on that, I’ve linked to a relevant Danish podcast in the notes.
It’s only in the US, apparently, that we decided that no one had any fun in the Middle Ages ever,
(01:58):
and therefore we needed Renaissance Festivals. So this episode is for exploring how the stateside
Ren Faire got its start, and how it has more in common with hippie communes than you might expect.
The first time I went to a Renaissance Faire, I was about 7 years old, and I had no idea who
Steeleye Span were. So I had zero context for anything, I was 100 percent sure that
(02:23):
I actually met a witch, and I was of course obsessed with the jousting. In retrospect, my
future as a medievalist was always in the cards. Sorry for making you worry about my career choice,
Mom — and thanks for all those drives to the PA Ren Faire. I have a special soft spot for the
shire of Mount Hope, Pennsylvania, having attended it with friends in high school and college, and,
(02:44):
later, as a dancer — so if you’re listening to this while road-tripping there, let me know!
So what is a Renaissance Faire? Is it, as one cultural commentator opined,
the antithesis of a theme park? In some ways, some places, maybe. Alternatively,
it could be described as a theme park for nerds. I’m not sure it’s accurate to call Ren Faires
(03:06):
quieter than theme parks, but the sounds are different, and it’s definitely a pre-industrial
uproar. There’s no hum of machinery; there are no roller-coaster screams. Such screaming as there is
generally comes from excited spectators at jousts. There’s — perhaps obviously — no piped-in music,
but there might well be bagpipes. In my experience, Ren Faires are also
(03:29):
pleasantly convivial spaces, where it’s easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger,
and you’re more likely to share space than compete for it. But defining the
Ren Faire — where there are frequently themed weekends for such things as pirates, dragons,
and… Scots and Irish people, who notably exist in the 21st century — remains challenging.
(03:49):
Rachel Lee Rubin, a professor of American Studies, has described “Functional paradox”
as “the stock-in-trade of the American Renaissance faire.” And I think this gets
at something important. The mystery of how it all functions has much to do, I would argue,
with the degree to which the Renaissance Faire has established itself as a cultural institution,
(04:09):
with its own traditions and customs, and a set of recognizable identities claimed by those who work,
play, and sojourn there. Elements of it are similar to historical reenactment;
elements of it are reminiscent of folk festivals, or even theme parks. In other
words, it’s a distinctive cultural phenomenon, where you might not only
hear scenes from Shakespeare performed, but also heckle Shakespeare personally.
(04:34):
One of the most surprising things I discovered while researching this episode is that there is,
apparently, some kind of educational goal underlying — at least some — Renaissance Faires.
While I have always had a great time eating fried vegetables and listening to folk music at them,
and cheering appropriately for Good Queen Bess and that upstart playwright William
Shakespeare… I didn’t notice the educational intent. In the midst of finalizing my script,
(04:57):
though, I met a representative of the Arkansas Renaissance Faire, who,
when I introduced myself as someone in charge of a Medieval and Renaissance Studies program,
enthusiastically volunteered that there was such a goal. Who knew!
My surprise here is, admittedly, professional. It’s not that I don’t think people can enjoy
history and flower crowns and fried vegetables all at the same time. All of these things are
(05:20):
delightful. But in my experience, there are more history nerds and aficionados who say “Hey,
let’s go to the Ren Faire!” than people who come to the serious study of history by way of the
faire. There’s also the fact that I spend a lot of time talking to people who are somewhere from
mildly disgruntled to actively mad at me because the history courses I teach are less like the
(05:45):
imagined past than they expected. Which is to say: I think there’s a lot more to explore in
the history of the Ren Faire than necessarily in the Ren Faire’s relationship to history.
Kimberley Korol-Evans is one of the, so far, comparatively few people who have researched the
cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance Festival in the US. And she has called for more investigation
(06:08):
of questions such as whether Renaissance Faires set in differing fictive locations — England vs.
France — draw different visitors. She has also suggested that different eras of the English
Renaissance, Henrician and Elizabethan, might attract different patrons. Now, I’m not sure
about this, myself. But maybe it’s only casual faire-goers, like me, for whom “How far do I
(06:31):
have to drive?” is the most significant Ren Faire criterion. And maybe more people than I suspect
really do have big feelings about a Ren Faire set during the reign of Henry VIII vs. one set in the
reign of Good Queen Bess. The roots of the Ren Faire as such are in part connected to education,
but the Ren Faire itself was initially designed as a place not primarily for educating people
(06:53):
about the 16th century but as a place for escaping from the twentieth… and rediscovering pleasure.
This is, in fact, where the hippies come into it. The first US Renaissance Faire came into
being just outside Los Angeles — in 1963. Between the end of the Chatterley ban and
the Beatles’ first LP, as the poet Philip Larkin would describe that pivotal moment in pop culture.
(07:15):
Change was everywhere. In the case of the Ren Faire, it just so happened to be heralded,
in a more than usually literal sense, by trumpets and banners. The Renaissance Pleasure Festival of
Laurel Canyon was founded by a couple with a vision for how the faire could be both a
haven for artists, and a place for envisioning an alternative to the narrow cultural norms of 1950s
(07:37):
suburbia. “Through its willful turn to the old,” as Rachel Lee Rubin has argued, it “became a place
to experiment with the new.” It also became, from its earliest days onward, what it has remained:
a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It could be a safe space for veterans;
a place for artisans to actually make money from their skill in specialized crafts; a space
(08:01):
to explore a range of options for inhabiting gender. Rubin has argued that the phenomenon
of the Renaissance Faire helped to invent the 1960s as we know or remember them: as a decade
of experimentation (08:12):
of rejection of recent norms, and rediscovery of old traditions; of great music,
whether the Child Ballads or the ballads of Bob Dylan; and of fashion that wasn’t afraid of either
color or medievalism. Two years after the founding of the Ren Faire, Allen Ginsberg, who saw the best
minds of his generation destroyed by madness, delivered a speech titled “Renaissance or Die.”
(08:35):
The first Ren Faire, though, began on a much more modest scale, with a commedia dell’arte cart and
a vision for both education and play outside the mainstream. A bit of important historical context,
here, is that 1963 was also a time when Hollywood was still under the shadow
of McCarthyism. So there was an unusual number of skilled actors, techs, artists,
(08:59):
and organizers who were available to work and interested in doing social commentary
via whimsical satire — in the best medieval and Renaissance tradition. Now, that framing is mine,
rather than that of the participants. Show a medievalist a political satire and we will say:
aha! What a great medieval tradition! Which it is! But participants in the first Renaissance Faire
(09:22):
saw themselves as awakening from a second “Dark Ages of McCarthyism.” The Renaissance, in other
words, for the American cultural imagination, is in a sort of sweet spot: providing an alternative
to modernity while also imagined as a time and place where you can have fun and also ideas.
(09:43):
Having fun is, in fact, crucial to the history and present of the Renaissance Faire. And it is
also part of its subversive identity. In the first Ren Faire, this took the form of spoofing fears of
communism by pointing out parallels to Elizabethan anxieties about an “international heretical
Spanish conspiracy.” At any faire, you’re likely to find people exulting in both skills and
(10:08):
identities that are often treated as peripheral elsewhere. You’ll also find people gently poking
fun at the phenomenon of the Renaissance Faire itself; the faire band Empty Hats, for instance,
quips that they’ve been making quality music since 1564! It is worth noting that music of all kinds
has long been central to the faire experience. There are pipes and flutes and hurdy-gurdies,
(10:31):
and even the occasional shawm, but there are also folk bands, continuing the early crossover
between musicians who made music at or about the early Renaissance Faires of the west coast,
and those who used the instruments or inspirations of the Renaissance in their own work. The subgenre
known variously as medieval folk, medieval folk-rock, or most paradoxically, “medieval rock”
(10:54):
owes much to the Renaissance Faire, as does the subgenre of so-called “Celtic music.” Notably, the
influences on this music are culturally as well as chronologically diverse, with ouds and tambourines
playing alongside violins, and electronic drones alongside hand-carved wooden instruments.
This is one of the many things, I think, that highlights not only the gaps between popular
(11:18):
perceptions of the 16th century and its reality, but also those interesting ones between its
reality and how that reality is evoked at a Ren Faire. And this is one place where I differ in my
conclusions from Kimberly Korol-Evans. This may have something to do with our different fields:
her PhD is in theater and drama, while mine is in history. Maybe she’s just more of an optimist than
(11:42):
I am. But she tends to interpret the phenomenon of the Ren Faire as more closely connected to
the 16th century, and contributing to embodied research on it, than I do. It may also be that
the Maryland festival, on which she based her research, is quite unusually preoccupied with
education for both its performers and its patrons. I tend to align more with the interpretation of
(12:05):
Rachel Lee Rubin, who has suggested that, whatever the position of individual faire
performers on the vexed question of authenticity, what Ren Faires do really effectively is open a
conversation about what the past was, and about what we want from it in the present.
Ren Faires, moreover, can have distinctive local cultures of their own. This is showcased,
(12:28):
for example, in the recent documentary on the Texas Renaissance Festival,
which is overseen by an eccentric who calls himself a king and appears to be run with
a lot less communal input by vendors and performers than sixteenth-century peasants
would have expected to have in the policies of the landlords they dealt with. And the local and
regional contexts of the faires do matter to the question of who comes. But across faires,
(12:51):
many patrons find excitement in liberation from usual identities, and taking on other ones,
with or without costumes — or garb, as it’s known in this context. And this can include
a range of approaches to the opportunities of the past, evoking not just a fairly narrow and
historically Anglocentric segment of history, but multiple cultures and even alternative histories.
(13:16):
Faires do still tend to be, to paraphrase Doctor Who, whiter than the actual European past,
but observation both anecdotal and anthropological suggests that this is gradually changing.
In concluding her monograph on Renaissance Festivals, Korol-Evans describes Faire patrons
and performers as “a community of people who celebrate the sixteenth century, in reality a
(13:39):
world lit only by fire.” And I said “Awww” sadly out loud. Because the idea of premodern Europe as
A World Lit Only By Fire is one of the hoariest clichés of bad medievalism. The implication,
in the book of the same title, is that there wasn’t very much fire, and you wouldn’t like what
you saw by its light very much anyway. (The book was written by an excellent journalist who decided
(14:04):
he was qualified as a historian for some reason.) And as actual historians have been saying for a
long time now, the image of a Middle Ages in which “intellectual life had vanished from Europe” — I’m
not kidding; the book actually says that — simply isn’t accurate. Or helpful. And also,
to be fair to Faire people (sorry about the pun): I don’t think that what they,
(14:27):
or we, are doing is as straightforward as celebrating the sixteenth century.
At any Faire, there are silly songs and fairy wings and fried food. At many, there is jousting.
But also — both according to the published scholarship, and in my own experience — there’s
also at least some acknowledgment of imbalances of power, and the very real sixteenth-century
(14:50):
debates about how that power should be exercised, and by whom. Increasingly,
too, there’s acknowledgment in the casting, structure, and theming of Faire events — not
just in the garb of attendees — that the world of the sixteenth century was an interconnected one,
where people were encountering each other in new ways. There’s a lot going on, in short. And this,
(15:12):
to me, is a significant part of the Ren Faire’s distinctive charm, as a place where folk bands,
Monty Python cosplayers, blacksmiths, fortune-tellers, and even the odd historian
all mingle in the same crowded, deliberately playful space. It is a place, as one interviewee
beautifully put it, where it is hard to be ashamed. While its counter-culture roots may not
(15:34):
always be visible, the Renaissance Faire, I would argue, has developed a rich subculture of its own.
Before concluding, a special announcement: Footnoting History is looking for a new host! (15:41):
undefined
As regular listeners may have noticed, we’ve lost Josh from our rota (alas), and while no one can
replace his particular sense of humor about late medieval politics, we are looking for someone else
to join our ranks. And you don’t have to be a medievalist! If you would love to be part of
(16:01):
Footnoting History, and have a PhD in history, or are getting a PhD in history, or have an MA
in history that you've been wanting to do more with, find the application form on our website.
If you don’t have post-graduate degrees in history but would also love to be
more involved with the podcast, we’d love to have you as one of
our Patreon supporters. Patreon subscribers get our newsletters — including, this fall,
(16:24):
Ren Faire photos — exclusive mini-episodes, and other content. As always, this and all
of our episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening,
and until next time, remember (16:35):
the best stories are always in the footnotes.
Today, the Renaissance Faire is a seasonal staple of nerd culture: from the long evenings of summer
to the brisk afternoons of fall, we gather and make merry. But how did the Ren Faire get started?
(00:23):
Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I will be discussing
the wild and wonderful history of the Renaissance Faire. For a maximally atmospheric listening
experience, please know that I am spelling Faire with an -e every time. I’m discussing
this phenomenon as someone who has attended and even performed at Renaissance Faires. And yes,
(00:47):
I own multiple costumes. But also, as a medievalist, I am acutely aware of how
the Ren Faire as we know and love it is almost entirely decoupled from… any actual Renaissance
history at all. And this led me to examine the Ren Faire as a phenomenon with a history all its own.
Before I go any further, I should clarify that in this episode, I’m discussing the Renaissance
(01:12):
Faire as a specifically US-American phenomenon. This is not to say that similar fairs don’t take
place elsewhere, but… they’re different. For one thing, the place where you go and people
dress up and there are musical gigs and sellers of food and fun little crafts in Germany is called,
not a Renaissance Faire, but a medieval market. Also, in Germany, you’re much more likely to hear
(01:36):
actual medieval music than folk covers. And to be at a medieval castle. The phenomenon in
Denmark — also with vendors and jousting and all the fun of the fair — is also called ‘medieval.’
If you want more on that, I’ve linked to a relevant Danish podcast in the notes.
It’s only in the US, apparently, that we decided that no one had any fun in the Middle Ages ever,
(01:58):
and therefore we needed Renaissance Festivals. So this episode is for exploring how the stateside
Ren Faire got its start, and how it has more in common with hippie communes than you might expect.
The first time I went to a Renaissance Faire, I was about 7 years old, and I had no idea who
Steeleye Span were. So I had zero context for anything, I was 100 percent sure that
(02:23):
I actually met a witch, and I was of course obsessed with the jousting. In retrospect, my
future as a medievalist was always in the cards. Sorry for making you worry about my career choice,
Mom — and thanks for all those drives to the PA Ren Faire. I have a special soft spot for the
shire of Mount Hope, Pennsylvania, having attended it with friends in high school and college, and,
(02:44):
later, as a dancer — so if you’re listening to this while road-tripping there, let me know!
So what is a Renaissance Faire? Is it, as one cultural commentator opined,
the antithesis of a theme park? In some ways, some places, maybe. Alternatively,
it could be described as a theme park for nerds. I’m not sure it’s accurate to call Ren Faires
(03:06):
quieter than theme parks, but the sounds are different, and it’s definitely a pre-industrial
uproar. There’s no hum of machinery; there are no roller-coaster screams. Such screaming as there is
generally comes from excited spectators at jousts. There’s — perhaps obviously — no piped-in music,
but there might well be bagpipes. In my experience, Ren Faires are also
(03:29):
pleasantly convivial spaces, where it’s easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger,
and you’re more likely to share space than compete for it. But defining the
Ren Faire — where there are frequently themed weekends for such things as pirates, dragons,
and… Scots and Irish people, who notably exist in the 21st century — remains challenging.
(03:49):
Rachel Lee Rubin, a professor of American Studies, has described “Functional paradox”
as “the stock-in-trade of the American Renaissance faire.” And I think this gets
at something important. The mystery of how it all functions has much to do, I would argue,
with the degree to which the Renaissance Faire has established itself as a cultural institution,
(04:09):
with its own traditions and customs, and a set of recognizable identities claimed by those who work,
play, and sojourn there. Elements of it are similar to historical reenactment;
elements of it are reminiscent of folk festivals, or even theme parks. In other
words, it’s a distinctive cultural phenomenon, where you might not only
hear scenes from Shakespeare performed, but also heckle Shakespeare personally.
(04:34):
One of the most surprising things I discovered while researching this episode is that there is,
apparently, some kind of educational goal underlying — at least some — Renaissance Faires.
While I have always had a great time eating fried vegetables and listening to folk music at them,
and cheering appropriately for Good Queen Bess and that upstart playwright William
Shakespeare… I didn’t notice the educational intent. In the midst of finalizing my script,
(04:57):
though, I met a representative of the Arkansas Renaissance Faire, who,
when I introduced myself as someone in charge of a Medieval and Renaissance Studies program,
enthusiastically volunteered that there was such a goal. Who knew!
My surprise here is, admittedly, professional. It’s not that I don’t think people can enjoy
history and flower crowns and fried vegetables all at the same time. All of these things are
(05:20):
delightful. But in my experience, there are more history nerds and aficionados who say “Hey,
let’s go to the Ren Faire!” than people who come to the serious study of history by way of the
faire. There’s also the fact that I spend a lot of time talking to people who are somewhere from
mildly disgruntled to actively mad at me because the history courses I teach are less like the
(05:45):
imagined past than they expected. Which is to say: I think there’s a lot more to explore in
the history of the Ren Faire than necessarily in the Ren Faire’s relationship to history.
Kimberley Korol-Evans is one of the, so far, comparatively few people who have researched the
cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance Festival in the US. And she has called for more investigation
(06:08):
of questions such as whether Renaissance Faires set in differing fictive locations — England vs.
France — draw different visitors. She has also suggested that different eras of the English
Renaissance, Henrician and Elizabethan, might attract different patrons. Now, I’m not sure
about this, myself. But maybe it’s only casual faire-goers, like me, for whom “How far do I
(06:31):
have to drive?” is the most significant Ren Faire criterion. And maybe more people than I suspect
really do have big feelings about a Ren Faire set during the reign of Henry VIII vs. one set in the
reign of Good Queen Bess. The roots of the Ren Faire as such are in part connected to education,
but the Ren Faire itself was initially designed as a place not primarily for educating people
(06:53):
about the 16th century but as a place for escaping from the twentieth… and rediscovering pleasure.
This is, in fact, where the hippies come into it. The first US Renaissance Faire came into
being just outside Los Angeles — in 1963. Between the end of the Chatterley ban and
the Beatles’ first LP, as the poet Philip Larkin would describe that pivotal moment in pop culture.
(07:15):
Change was everywhere. In the case of the Ren Faire, it just so happened to be heralded,
in a more than usually literal sense, by trumpets and banners. The Renaissance Pleasure Festival of
Laurel Canyon was founded by a couple with a vision for how the faire could be both a
haven for artists, and a place for envisioning an alternative to the narrow cultural norms of 1950s
(07:37):
suburbia. “Through its willful turn to the old,” as Rachel Lee Rubin has argued, it “became a place
to experiment with the new.” It also became, from its earliest days onward, what it has remained:
a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It could be a safe space for veterans;
a place for artisans to actually make money from their skill in specialized crafts; a space
(08:01):
to explore a range of options for inhabiting gender. Rubin has argued that the phenomenon
of the Renaissance Faire helped to invent the 1960s as we know or remember them: as a decade
of experimentation (08:12):
of rejection of recent norms, and rediscovery of old traditions; of great music,
whether the Child Ballads or the ballads of Bob Dylan; and of fashion that wasn’t afraid of either
color or medievalism. Two years after the founding of the Ren Faire, Allen Ginsberg, who saw the best
minds of his generation destroyed by madness, delivered a speech titled “Renaissance or Die.”
(08:35):
The first Ren Faire, though, began on a much more modest scale, with a commedia dell’arte cart and
a vision for both education and play outside the mainstream. A bit of important historical context,
here, is that 1963 was also a time when Hollywood was still under the shadow
of McCarthyism. So there was an unusual number of skilled actors, techs, artists,
(08:59):
and organizers who were available to work and interested in doing social commentary
via whimsical satire — in the best medieval and Renaissance tradition. Now, that framing is mine,
rather than that of the participants. Show a medievalist a political satire and we will say:
aha! What a great medieval tradition! Which it is! But participants in the first Renaissance Faire
(09:22):
saw themselves as awakening from a second “Dark Ages of McCarthyism.” The Renaissance, in other
words, for the American cultural imagination, is in a sort of sweet spot: providing an alternative
to modernity while also imagined as a time and place where you can have fun and also ideas.
(09:43):
Having fun is, in fact, crucial to the history and present of the Renaissance Faire. And it is
also part of its subversive identity. In the first Ren Faire, this took the form of spoofing fears of
communism by pointing out parallels to Elizabethan anxieties about an “international heretical
Spanish conspiracy.” At any faire, you’re likely to find people exulting in both skills and
(10:08):
identities that are often treated as peripheral elsewhere. You’ll also find people gently poking
fun at the phenomenon of the Renaissance Faire itself; the faire band Empty Hats, for instance,
quips that they’ve been making quality music since 1564! It is worth noting that music of all kinds
has long been central to the faire experience. There are pipes and flutes and hurdy-gurdies,
(10:31):
and even the occasional shawm, but there are also folk bands, continuing the early crossover
between musicians who made music at or about the early Renaissance Faires of the west coast,
and those who used the instruments or inspirations of the Renaissance in their own work. The subgenre
known variously as medieval folk, medieval folk-rock, or most paradoxically, “medieval rock”
(10:54):
owes much to the Renaissance Faire, as does the subgenre of so-called “Celtic music.” Notably, the
influences on this music are culturally as well as chronologically diverse, with ouds and tambourines
playing alongside violins, and electronic drones alongside hand-carved wooden instruments.
This is one of the many things, I think, that highlights not only the gaps between popular
(11:18):
perceptions of the 16th century and its reality, but also those interesting ones between its
reality and how that reality is evoked at a Ren Faire. And this is one place where I differ in my
conclusions from Kimberly Korol-Evans. This may have something to do with our different fields:
her PhD is in theater and drama, while mine is in history. Maybe she’s just more of an optimist than
(11:42):
I am. But she tends to interpret the phenomenon of the Ren Faire as more closely connected to
the 16th century, and contributing to embodied research on it, than I do. It may also be that
the Maryland festival, on which she based her research, is quite unusually preoccupied with
education for both its performers and its patrons. I tend to align more with the interpretation of
(12:05):
Rachel Lee Rubin, who has suggested that, whatever the position of individual faire
performers on the vexed question of authenticity, what Ren Faires do really effectively is open a
conversation about what the past was, and about what we want from it in the present.
Ren Faires, moreover, can have distinctive local cultures of their own. This is showcased,
(12:28):
for example, in the recent documentary on the Texas Renaissance Festival,
which is overseen by an eccentric who calls himself a king and appears to be run with
a lot less communal input by vendors and performers than sixteenth-century peasants
would have expected to have in the policies of the landlords they dealt with. And the local and
regional contexts of the faires do matter to the question of who comes. But across faires,
(12:51):
many patrons find excitement in liberation from usual identities, and taking on other ones,
with or without costumes — or garb, as it’s known in this context. And this can include
a range of approaches to the opportunities of the past, evoking not just a fairly narrow and
historically Anglocentric segment of history, but multiple cultures and even alternative histories.
(13:16):
Faires do still tend to be, to paraphrase Doctor Who, whiter than the actual European past,
but observation both anecdotal and anthropological suggests that this is gradually changing.
In concluding her monograph on Renaissance Festivals, Korol-Evans describes Faire patrons
and performers as “a community of people who celebrate the sixteenth century, in reality a
(13:39):
world lit only by fire.” And I said “Awww” sadly out loud. Because the idea of premodern Europe as
A World Lit Only By Fire is one of the hoariest clichés of bad medievalism. The implication,
in the book of the same title, is that there wasn’t very much fire, and you wouldn’t like what
you saw by its light very much anyway. (The book was written by an excellent journalist who decided
(14:04):
he was qualified as a historian for some reason.) And as actual historians have been saying for a
long time now, the image of a Middle Ages in which “intellectual life had vanished from Europe” — I’m
not kidding; the book actually says that — simply isn’t accurate. Or helpful. And also,
to be fair to Faire people (sorry about the pun): I don’t think that what they,
(14:27):
or we, are doing is as straightforward as celebrating the sixteenth century.
At any Faire, there are silly songs and fairy wings and fried food. At many, there is jousting.
But also — both according to the published scholarship, and in my own experience — there’s
also at least some acknowledgment of imbalances of power, and the very real sixteenth-century
(14:50):
debates about how that power should be exercised, and by whom. Increasingly,
too, there’s acknowledgment in the casting, structure, and theming of Faire events — not
just in the garb of attendees — that the world of the sixteenth century was an interconnected one,
where people were encountering each other in new ways. There’s a lot going on, in short. And this,
(15:12):
to me, is a significant part of the Ren Faire’s distinctive charm, as a place where folk bands,
Monty Python cosplayers, blacksmiths, fortune-tellers, and even the odd historian
all mingle in the same crowded, deliberately playful space. It is a place, as one interviewee
beautifully put it, where it is hard to be ashamed. While its counter-culture roots may not
(15:34):
always be visible, the Renaissance Faire, I would argue, has developed a rich subculture of its own.
Before concluding, a special announcement: Footnoting History is looking for a new host! (15:41):
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As regular listeners may have noticed, we’ve lost Josh from our rota (alas), and while no one can
replace his particular sense of humor about late medieval politics, we are looking for someone else
to join our ranks. And you don’t have to be a medievalist! If you would love to be part of
(16:01):
Footnoting History, and have a PhD in history, or are getting a PhD in history, or have an MA
in history that you've been wanting to do more with, find the application form on our website.
If you don’t have post-graduate degrees in history but would also love to be
more involved with the podcast, we’d love to have you as one of
our Patreon supporters. Patreon subscribers get our newsletters — including, this fall,
(16:24):
Ren Faire photos — exclusive mini-episodes, and other content. As always, this and all
of our episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening,
and until next time, remember (16:35):
the best stories are always in the footnotes.
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