ANST - Documentation
James Crouchet
jtc at io.com
Mon Feb 15 23:33:33 PST 1999
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
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