Download or read book Medieval Fantasy as Performance written by Michael A. Cramer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Michael Cramer views the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an organization that studies and recreates the middle ages, as a case study for a growing fascination with medieval fantasy in popular culture. He explores the act of medieval re-creation as performance by focusing on the SCA, describing the group's activities, investigating its place in popular culture, and looking at the SCA not so much as a historical society but as an on-going work of performance art; a postmodern counter-culture riff on what it means to be "medieval." Cramer examines the group's activities, from persona and character development to theatrical performance and personal interaction; from the complex official ceremonies to full contact armored combat with mock broadswords. He explores the SCA in detail to discover how its members adapt and employ ideas about the Middle Ages in performance, ritual reenactment, living history, and re-creation, analyzing the performance of identity through ritual, sport, drama, and personal interaction, and he focuses on the reconstruction of the medieval "king game," a game in which a mock king is chosen to reign over a mock court. The book also studies various ideas about medievalism, including the contrast between reenactment and re-creation, and places these activities in the context of contemporary American society. With three appendixes, a bibliography, and a selection of photos, Cramer demonstrates how and why medieval fantasy is increasingly used in popular culture and analyzes the dissatisfaction with contemporary culture that leads people into these realms of fantasy.
Download or read book Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No volume about the spectacles and public performances of early modern England could pretend to treat comprehensively a body of materials so conspicuously vast. Rather than efforts to survey the territory, these essays are best understood in the original sense of the term as “essays”—as trials, attempts, experiments to open alternative ways of understanding that vast corpus of mystery plays, civic pageants, court masques and professional dramas that constitute its subject. The book crosses traditional period lines, including studies of Medieval as well as Renaissance entertainments. Once more, the essays are not organized according to a single critical or historical methodology. They employ an eclectic range of interpretive practices, reflecting the variety of interpretive approaches now current in the field. Contributors include: Tiffany J. Alkan, Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Sarah Beckwith, Tom Bishop, Peter Cockett, Richard K. Emmerson, Peter Holland, Nora Johnson, Richard C. McCoy, Lauren Shohet, and Robert E. Stillman.
Download or read book Hild written by Nicola Griffith and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daughter of a poisoned prince and a crafty noblewoman, quiet, bright-minded Hild arrives at the court of King Edwin of Northumbria, where the six-year-old takes on the role of seer/consiglieri for a monarch troubled by shifting allegiances and Roman emissaries attempting to spread their new religion.
Download or read book A Feast for the Eyes written by Christina Normore and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Feast for the Eyes is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries"--Jacket.
Download or read book A City Dreaming written by Daniel Polansky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful magician returns to New York City and reluctantly finds himself in the middle of a war between the city’s two most powerful witches. “It would help if you did not think of it as magic. M certainly had long ceased to do so.” M is an ageless drifter with a sharp tongue, few scruples, and the ability to bend reality to his will, ever so slightly. He’s come back to New York City after a long absence, and though he’d much rather spend his days drinking artisanal beer in his favorite local bar, his old friends—and his enemies—have other plans for him. One night M might find himself squaring off against the pirates who cruise the Gowanus Canal; another night sees him at a fashionable uptown charity auction where the waitstaff are all zombies. A subway ride through the inner circles of hell? In M’s world, that’s practically a pleasant diversion. Before too long, M realizes he’s landed in the middle of a power struggle between Celise, the elegant White Queen of Manhattan, and Abilene, Brooklyn’s hip, free-spirited Red Queen, a rivalry that threatens to make New York go the way of Atlantis. To stop it, M will have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he’s ever acquired—he might even have to get out of bed before noon. Enter a world of Wall Street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steampunk universes, and demonic coffee shops. M’s New York, the infinite nexus of the universe, really is a city that never sleeps—but is always dreaming.
Download or read book Music in Films on the Middle Ages written by John Haines and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema’s main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.
Download or read book The Fantasy Role Playing Game written by Daniel Mackay and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.
Download or read book Viking Heritage and History in Europe written by Sara Ellis Nilsson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viking Heritage and History in Europe presents new research and perspectives on the use of the Vikings in public history, especially in relation to museums, re-creation, and re-enactment in a European context. Taking a critical heritage approach, the volume provides new insights into the re-creation of history, imagining the past, interpretation, ambivalence of authenticity, authority of History, remembrance and memory, medievalism, and public history. Highlighting the complexity of the field of public history today, the fourteen chapters all engage with questions of historical authenticity and authority. The volume also critically examines the public’s reception, engagement with, and interpretation of the Viking Age and the concepts of who these individuals were. Each chapter illuminates an aspect of these themes in relation to museums, leisure activities, politics, tourism, re-enactment, and popular culture – all from the vantage point of Viking cultural heritage. Viking Heritage and History in Europe is one of the first volumes to examine the use and role of the Vikings within the field of public history, both past and present. The book will be of interest to those engaged in the study of heritage, public history, history, the Vikings, vikingism, medievalism, and media history.
Download or read book Medievalisms written by Tison Pugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From King Arthur and Robin Hood, through to video games and jousting-themed restaurants, medieval culture continues to surround us and has retained a strong influence on literature and culture throughout the ages. This fascinating and illuminating guide is written by two of the leading contemporary scholars of medieval literature, and explores: The influence of medieval cultural concepts on literature and film, including key authors such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Mark Twain The continued appeal of medieval cultural figures such as Dante, King Arthur, and Robin Hood The influence of the medieval on such varied disciplines such as politics, music, children’s literature, and art. Contemporary efforts to relive the Middle Ages. Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present surveys the critical field and sets the boundaries for future study, providing an essential background for literary study from the medieval period through to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Re living the American Frontier written by Nancy Reagin and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.
Download or read book Performing Fantasy and Reality in Contemporary Culture written by Anastasia Seregina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We frequently engage with that which we consciously perceive not to be real, yet fantasy, despite its pervasive presence and strong role in everyday life through its connection to identities, communities, desires, and meanings, has yet to be properly defined and researched. This book examines fantasy from a performance theory perspective. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature, it presents ethnographic and art-based research on live action role-playing games to explore fantasy as a bodily and negotiated phenomenon that involves various kinds of engagement with one’s surroundings. Overall, this book is a study of various forms and roles that fantasy can take on as part of contemporary Western culture. The study suggests that fantasy emerges as a different type of interpretation of normalised performance and reality, and can thus provide individuals with the tools to wield agency in everyday life. The book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, literature and performance studies.
Download or read book Theatre History Studies 2011 Vol 31 written by Rhona Justice-Malloy and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Theatre History Studies" is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text as well as SIRS From published reviews “This established annual is a major contribution to the scholarly analysis and historical documentation of international drama. Refereed, immaculately printed and illustrated . . . . The subject coverage ranges from the London season of 1883 to the influence of David Belasco on Eugene O’Neill.”—CHOICE “International in scope but with an emphasis on American, British, and Continental theater, this fine academic journal includes seven to nine scholarly articles dealing with everything from Filipino theater during the Japanese occupation to numerous articles on Shakespearean production to American children’s theater. . . . an excellent addition for academic, university, and large public libraries.”—Magazines for Libraries, 6th Edition
Download or read book Digital Gaming Re imagines the Middle Ages written by Daniel T. Kline and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital gaming’s cultural significance is often minimized much in the same way that the Middle Ages are discounted as the backward and childish precursor to the modern period. Digital Gaming Reimagines the Middle Ages challenges both perceptions by examining how the Middle Ages have persisted into the contemporary world via digital games as well as analyzing how digital gaming translates, adapts, and remediates medieval stories, themes, characters, and tropes in interactive electronic environments. At the same time, the Middle Ages are reinterpreted according to contemporary concerns and conflicts, in all their complexity. Rather than a distinct time in the past, the Middle Ages form a space in which theory and narrative, gaming and textuality, identity and society are remediated and reimagined. Together, the essays demonstrate that while having its roots firmly in narrative traditions, neomedieval gaming—where neomedievalism no longer negotiates with any reality beyond itself and other medievalisms—creates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts. Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages demonstrates that the medieval is more than just a stockpile of historically static facts but is a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.
Download or read book Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones written by Shiloh Carroll and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the biggest attractions of George R.R. Martin's high fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and by extension its HBO television adaptation, Game of Thrones, is its claim to historical realism. The author, thedirectors and producers of the adaptation, and indeed the fans of the books and show, all lay claim to Westeros, its setting, as representative of an authentic medieval world. But how true are these claims? Is it possible to faithfully represent a time so far removed from our own in time and culture? And what does an authentic medieval fantasy world look like? This book explores Martin's and HBO's approaches to and beliefs about the Middle Ages and how those beliefs fall into traditional medievalist and fantastic literary patterns. Examining both books and programme from a range of critical approaches - medievalism theory, gender theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, andrace theory - Dr Carroll analyzes how the drive for historical realism affects the books' and show's treatment of men, women, people of colour, sexuality, and imperialism, as well as how the author and showrunners discuss these effects outside the texts themselves. SHILOH CARROLL teaches in the writing center at Tennessee State University.
Download or read book Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism written by Helen Dell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.
Download or read book The Middle Ages in Computer Games written by Robert Houghton and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the most comprehensive analysis and discussion of medievalist computer games to date. Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern medium, there has hitherto been little scholarship devoted to them. This book explores the distinct nature of medievalism in digital games across a range of themes, from the portrayal of grotesque yet romantic conflict to conflicting depictions of the Church and religion. It likewise considers the distinctions between medievalist games and those of other periods, underlining their emphasis on fantasy, roleplay and hardcore elements, and their consequences for depictions of morality, race, gender and sexuality. Ultimately the book argues that while medievalist games are thoroughly influenced by medievalist and ludic tropes, they are nonetheless representative of a distinct new form of medievalism. It engages with the vast literature surrounding historical game studies, game design, and medievalism, and considers hundreds of games from across genres, from Assassin's Creed and Baldur's Gate to Crusader Kings and The Witcher series. In doing so, it provides a vital illustration of the state of the field and a cornerstone for future research and teaching.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe written by Judith M. Bennett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.
