For those of you in re-enactment circles. A request has come through the grape vine; initially through the Co. of St. George list. I've contacted the gentleman running the study and asked if he wanted the US English speaking re-enactment perspective as well as the British and he said "yes". Here's the original email with a link to the PDF file. If you're interested and when you've completed it, just email the PDF file to him.

Cheers,

Jenn

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quote:

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Dear friends of re-enactment,

I need your help!

I am a student of History, History of the English Language and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Goettingen, Germany. This year I attended a very interesting seminar about Medievalism that dealt with the question of how medieval times are percepted today. This course is obligatory for me to complete my master's degree and so I have to write a paper about re-enactment in Britain [US]. Not that this is a boring task! I love it because re-enactment of the Renaissance and the Viking Period has been my hobby for
seven years now and I enjoy every minute of it. Being able to write an academic paper about my own hobby is the best assignment I have had in years.

But apparently academia has neglected the topic completely and to my knowledge there are no studies at all that examine why and how people do re-enactment. There are not even proper definitions of what re-enactment is. In my opinion this is a shame! So many people enjoy going to historical events or battle re-enactments and have history brought alive in front of them, both in Britain and in Germany. Re-enactment is highly popular and there is a growing industry for equipment, insurance and the like so I think that this topic should be relevant to academic research and the general public since it forms such an important part in many people's lives.

The task of my paper now is to find out, what the re-enactment scene in Britain is like: What periods are popular? What are the major events? And above all: why do people devote so much time, money and effort in re-enacting historical events.As there is no academic literature about this topic the only option of finding out something about re-enactment in Britain is reading magazines like Skirmish and asking people that actually do re-enactment. This is why I need your help. I would highly appreciate it if you could fill out the questionnaire attached to this e-mail and send it back to me. It is just one
page with 16 brief questions about your society and your motivation to take up this interesting hobby. That would be so helpful!

I will use these questionnaires as some form of online interview and of course I will have to quote from them in my paper. If you want me to treat your answers anonymously, please let me know. The paper will be presented in English, so if you like I can send you a copy thank you for your efforts. I also hope that this paper might be published in one of the very few academic magazine that deal with Medievalism. If it is published, I will let
you know.

If you know of another club or society, that might want to participate in this survey as well, please feel free to forward it.

Thank you so much for your effort! You helped me a lot!

I hope you enjoy the next season with many interesting events.

Take care,

Friederike

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Questionnair PDF

Send to:

Friederike (dot) Szamborski (at )gmx (dot) de

Edited to fix link. Thanks Thomas.

[ 03-05-2008: Message edited by: Fire Stryker ]

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Actually cultural anthropology has not ignored the subject of re-enactment.

For example, Cathy Stanton Ph.D. did her master's thesis in cultural anthropology for Vermont College of Norwich University on "Being the Elephant: The American Civil War Reenacted" in 1997.

See her website at http://faculty.tui.edu/stantonc/index.html

Best Regard,

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