Re-enactment, living history, etc.

People in the SCA use a variety of terms as a "shorthand" in explaining quickly to newcomers what we do. Some of these terms, if misused, can cause hard feelings with other related groups. In fact, many of these groups overlap our areas of interest, and there's an opportunity for us to learn from one another, if we can avoid offending them by claiming to be something we're not.

Here's my take on the differences. Be warned that the following are generalities and personal opinions.

Re-enactment

A number of other groups call themselves "re-enactment" groups. Most of them focus on much narrower time periods than the SCA does (e.g. English Civil War, U.S. Civil War, French & Indian War, Hundred Years' War). Their most visible activities are typically the "re-enactment" of specific historical battles (e.g. Gettysburg) for a public audience, although many also re-enact events other than battles and continue their activities after the public has gone home. In part because they perform for the public, most "re-enactment" groups have strict standards for dress, equipment, language, etc. (e.g. if you're re-enacting a battle that took place in 1863, you don't use a style of gun that was only issued in 1864). In all these ways, the SCA differs substantially from re-enactment groups, and really shouldn't be described by that name.

Living History

There's a lot of overlap between "re-enactment" and "living history". Although there are amateur living-history groups, the term is most often applied to professional interpreters at historical sites like Williamsburg and Plimouth Plantation, people whose job is to play the role of a person from the specified time and place in order to make that time and place "come alive" for tourists. There tends to be less emphasis on combat and more on everyday life. The standards of living-history sites and groups, if anything, are even stricter than those of re-enactment groups. The SCA is not a "living history" organization, unless you use an extremely loose definition.

Renaissance Faire

The SCA's official temporal scope runs from the dawn of time (or the fall of the West Roman Empire, depending on whom you ask) to the year 1600 (or 1650, depending on whom you ask). Renaissance Faires typically have a later and narrower scope, e.g. 1550-1650 or even a specific year. Renaissance Faires also have a wide range of standards: some won't allow a performer in the gate with machine-sewn seams, while others cheerfully serve Ye Olde Englishe Chili Con Carne at Ye Olde Foode Courte next to Ye Olde Indian Face-Painting Booth. They all, however, differ from the SCA in being performances for a paying public. The performers are generally expected to stay "in character" at all times when dealing with the public. There's often a distinction between "regular" performers, who work the Faire for salary or tips every weekend for months on end, and those (often from the SCA, morris-dance teams, etc.) who show up for a day or two to demonstrate their particular specialty, seldom hoping to make any money at it.

Re-creation

I don't know that there's a single accepted definition of this term, but to me it feels like a looser form of "re-enactment", in which rather than re-enacting a specific historical event, we create artifacts and events that could have happened at some specific time in the past. This is closer to what the SCA does, although some of the sillier SCA events are intentional self-parodies that everybody knows could not have happened in the Middle Ages.

Experimental Archaeology

This term isn't used a lot in the SCA, but it's common among academics studying prehistoric technology and I like it. "Experimental archaeology", in a nutshell, means discovering new information about the past, not by reading about it or digging it up but by trying it.

Naturally, you start by reading everything you can find that's already known about the subject, including interpretations and speculations by respected historians, both academic and amateur. Then you move into the experimental phase. You build the tent, sleep in it through a few rainstorms, and see whether it protects you: if it doesn't, then that's not the way it was done back then. You cook the dish, using your best interpretation of the recipe, and see whether it's edible and matches the description in the recipe: if the recipe says it should be thick and "stondyng", and it never thickens, then you've misinterpreted the recipe. You sew the dress and put it on: if it falls off or looks nothing like the surviving pictures, you've done it wrong. People in the Middle Ages weren't stupid, by and large, and if something didn't work, they stopped using it. And they knew a lot more about living in the Middle Ages than we ever will.

Note that in all of the above examples, the conclusion was negative. Reconstructing an historical artifact and finding that it doesn't work constitutes proof that you've reconstructed or used it incorrectly. But reconstructing an historical artifact and finding that it does work does not prove that you've done it correctly; at best, it constitutes proof that "it could have been done this way". A famous example is Thor Heyerdahl's construction of papyrus-reed boats to demonstrate the possibility of long-distance ocean travel and cultural contact with that technology: he didn't prove that such travel and contact had happened (nor even that his boats were built in a historically-accurate manner), only that, contradicting then-received wisdom, such long-distance cultural contact could have happened.

Here's an article on experiment in archaeology by the director of an Iron Age farm in England, pointing out some requisites for a program of experimental archaeology to be academically respectable.

The SCA as a whole doesn't do experimental archaeology, but a few of its best researchers do.

Reconstruction archaeology

My impression is that this is a subset of experimental archaeology, above. I encountered the term at the Web site of Ancient Arts, an organization in Britain that provides public demos, classes, and artefacts for historical TV programs. They seem to concentrate on prehistoric technology, but have recently added some medieval workshops to their offerings.

Non-profit, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) educational organization

The SCA definitely is this, at least for legal and tax purposes. In fact, a large fraction of our activities are social rather than educational (which would seem to make us non-profit but not tax-exempt), but the SCA, Inc's legal advisors assure us that that's OK, as long as it's within an overall context (learning and teaching about the Middle Ages) which is educational, either to our members or to the public.

However, if we claim to be educating the public, we have a responsibility to avoid misleading the public. Standards for historical accuracy must be higher at demos, especially school demos, than at the average moderately-silly SCA event. I've seen people at demos doing 19th-century folk dances and calling them "medieval" (rule of thumb: don't call any dance "medieval", since the oldest surviving dance instructions date from Renaissance Italy.) I've seen people at demos explaining the SCA's system of choosing rulers by single-combat elimination tournaments, or naming people "Dukes" after they've been King twice, or various other eccentricities of SCA subculture, and leaving the impression that things were done that way in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, I've also seen very well done demos which draw clear lines between what we know and what we don't, what the SCA does and what medieval people did, and which really serve to educate both the public and our own members.

Just my own ranting, with some contributions from my wife Deborah (aka Magistra Rufina Cambrensis). There used to be an interesting article on the subject, Bill Hubbard's Definitions of Living History, but that link seems to have died. See also Cynthia Virtue's List of Re-Creation, Re-Enactment, and Living History Groups.