SC - Re: Period Norse

[Bethany Public Library]

At 5:20 PM -0800 3/6/00, Ron and Laurene Wells wrote:


(quoting me)

>  >What makes you think it is not period meat preparation?
>
>Just the way I have ALWAYS seen it served I guess...  I have only been to a
>very few feasts though, maybe it was just coincidence.

You are making a very common mistake--assuming that one can get 
reliable information on period practice from observing what happens 
in the SCA. The SCA is a decentralized, volunteer organization with 
very weak mechanisms for spreading accurate information. Further, in 
the SCA people can often get status by claiming that something is 
historically accurate, whether or not it is.

The result is a mix of accurate historical facts, invented facts that 
are perceived as historically true because they have been repeated 
many times (the idea that "remove" is the period term for "course," 
for example), historical errors, and deliberate fraud. In the case of 
cooking, if a particular area's feasts are done by people who want to 
do "medieval feasts" but haven't actually read any medieval 
cookbooks, the result is likely to be based on their uninformed guess 
about what medieval feast were like, which can sometimes be wildly 
inaccurate. After they have done it for a while, everyone else takes 
it for granted that what they are doing defines a medieval feast. "Of 
course it's period--we've been doing it for years."

The best way to form an opinion about medieval cooking is to read 
medieval cookbooks and secondary sources by reliable 
scholars--remembering that not everybody who publishes on a subject 
actually is a reliable scholar. Another way is to discuss it with 
people in the SCA who actually know what they are talking about, 
provided you can figure which ones those are. Simply observing SCA 
practice, however, is a fair poor way of getting such information.

David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/