[Ansteorra] Courtesy challenge

[Marc Carlson]

>Klfrench1023 at aol.com Klfrench1023 at aol.com
>>As for the Dream as it used to be, but I believe the "Machiavellian  
>>attitudes, back-stabbing politics, and endless  grasping for  personal 
>>gain" have been a part of the Current Middle Ages far longer  than the 
>>more than quarter century I've been aware of, and the two  decades I've 
>>been a member of the Society.
>Indeed they were around, as was I.  I suggested nothing fallacious or  
>dichotomous...

As much as I don't want to fight about this either, I am saying that your 
suggestion that it's either/or for "The Dream" and "Machiavellian" politics 
-is- a false dichotomy.   I daresay that we could find examples in the 
Society of people who are doing or have done both.

It is impossible to "re-enact" an ideal or a fantasy.  That implies that 
they were, in fact, ever done that way.

I don't have any problem with people wanting to be kind, chivalrous, 
courteous, or for that matter, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.  My point 
is, and has been, that these are not (generally speaking) historically 
accurate interpretations of the actual behaviors of the past.  They are a 
resut of a 19th century fantasy, a perfectly good fantasy to be sure, but 
not medieval, and even then, not universal.

The SCA appears to idealize a fantasy, a "dream".  That's great.  N o one's 
challenging that.  It's not history though, and I'm not going to pretend it 
is.

I will say that considering how predictably this discussion continues to 
take place - even to the argument of if we're not going to do the fantasy, 
we must be doing only those things that are really negative suggests a 
suprisingly dark, and erroneous understanding of what the Middle Ages were 
actually like, mostly due, I suspect to more mythology and folklore than to 
anything that is actually -know- about the periods in question.

Marc/Diarmaid