SC - OT Creativity Changes

[david friedman]

At 9:04 PM -0400 6/25/98, John and Barbara Enloe wrote:

> Our questions centered around how we have gained and how we have lost
>considering these factors.  By being able to purchase items, does that
>decrease a person's motivation for doing? (either making or bartering).

Somewhat. The incentive to dabble in everything, which was one of the fun
things about the SCA in the early years, is less, since you know you can
buy some things in better quality and lower cost than you can make them
yourself. On the other hand, the fact that you can purchase period spices
from the pepperer's guild or pigments from Megan makes it easier to do
things yourself, at a higher level, than it was twenty years ago. And the
fact that you can get information--free online, or  at fairly low cost
elsewhere--makes doing things in a period fashion considerably easier than
it used to be.

Consider period Islamic cooking. When I started, there was one source
available in English--in a volume of a scholarly journal published some
forty years earlier. Now there are three, pretty readily available. The
only English source for French period cooking was a bad translation of the
cooking section of Le Menagier, in an old translation of the whole book.
Now there are good translations available of Le Menagier, Taillevent, and
Chiquart (at least).

>Does the pursuit of exact reproductions drive people away from trying to
>(cook a feast, make a project, make a wine, which is our personal love) due
>to lack of time, resources, a fear of not meeting "the standards" or
>perhaps just wanting to have fun doing something different?

I don't think so. As far as cooking is concerned, medieval meals are not
generally available for purchase--if you want them, for yourself or your
group, you have to make them yourself.

If you want to do something different, there are lots of period recipes
that haven't been done yet. And of course, in most groups,  a serious
attempt at a period feast is something different. What bothers me is how
often the desire to "do something different" means a gimmick feast,
designed with no thought about, or concern for, the availability of period
recipes (i.e. a "Marco Polo" feast or the like).

So far as fear of not meeting the standards, I'm not sure I entirely
understand the point--if you are doing something for the fun of it, the
relevant standards are your own.
>
>	All debates of where the name of our Society came from and what is the
>definition of the "Dream" put aside;  Are we moving from "re-creating the
>Middle Ages as they might have been" (per the Known World Handbook pg. 1),
>"striving to recapture the ambiance of the Middle Ages and Renaissance", to
>... researching and reproducing the Middle Ages as they were?

I think there has been very mild progress in that direction.

>	Have we moved from living the Dream to attending a graduate-level
>history
>class?

No--in lots of ways.

1. Our average is more at the kindergarten level.

2. What we do isn't "attending a class" at any level. So far as I can tell,
nobody in the SCA studies period cooking merely in order to know about
period cooking--people study period cooking in order to do it.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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