ANST - Documentation

[James Crouchet]

On 15 Feb 99,, Lady Simone wrote:

> 
> I understand the reasoning for documentation. Documentation though dose not
> reflect on the Quality of an artesian  Some artisans spend so much time
> working on and perfecting their art, that they may not have the time, wish
> or research skills to do Documentation.  and when a full 1/5 of an artisans
> scores based on documentation you set the potential for Those with inferior
> work to  elevated over those with Quality work.
> 

I won't repeat what others have said, but will point out something 
that many people may not have considered about documentation. 

The SCA is rife with bits of "SCA history". When I got in, everyone 
"knew" that guns were not used on the battlefield before 1600. 
Everyone "knew" that lunge attacks were not used in rapier 
fighting in period and everyone "knew" that the styles of period 
masters such as Saviolo and Di Grassi could not be used 
effectively. 

A funny thing happened in rapier; people started asking for 
documentation. Not for every move, but if you claimed a move was 
period or that one master advocated a particular type of weapon, 
you could be sure someone would ask for your source. So we all 
started reading our sources a bit more. And we started learning 
more. We have learned a lot of real history, not SCAisms. Imagine 
my surprise as I discovered that various bits of wisdom, shared 
with me in good faith by friends, were hooey.

I'll admit that it is sometimes annoying to have to site a source. But 
it does get to the heart of our focus. History. I know those SCAisms 
exist in other areas besides rapier fighting, and I expect that 
asking for documentation is the best way to dispel them.

If someone creates a wonderful of art, how do they know if it 
resembles anything from history? If the artist simply relies on the 
advice of others he/she may be the victim of more SCAisms, and 
may then help spread that false information further.

The artist needs to do the research to discover the what is 
accurate and what is not. The documentation shows us that the 
artist actually did the research.

BTW, I like documentation that I could take home and actually take 
a stab at doing a similar piece of art myself. It is very easy to turn 
that sort of paper into an instructional booklet to help spread the 
skills around a bit. 

Christian Doré
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.