Today, the Renaissance Faire is a seasonal staple  of nerd culture: from the long evenings of summer to the brisk afternoons of fall, we gather and  make merry.

But how did the Ren Faire get started?

Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History.

I’m  Lucy, and on this episode, I will be discussing the wild and wonderful history of the Renaissance  Faire.

For a maximally atmospheric listening experience, please know that I am spelling  Faire with an -e every time.

I’m discussing this phenomenon as someone who has attended and  even performed at Renaissance Faires.

And yes, I own multiple costumes.

But also, as a  medievalist, I am acutely aware of how the Ren Faire as we know and love it is almost  entirely decoupled from… any actual Renaissance history at all.

And this led me to examine the Ren  Faire as a phenomenon with a history all its own.

Before I go any further, I should clarify that  in this episode, I’m discussing the Renaissance Faire as a specifically US-American phenomenon.

This is not to say that similar fairs don’t take place elsewhere, but… they’re different.

For  one thing, the place where you go and people dress up and there are musical gigs and sellers of  food and fun little crafts in Germany is called, not a Renaissance Faire, but a medieval market.

Also, in Germany, you’re much more likely to hear actual medieval music than folk covers.

And  to be at a medieval castle.

The phenomenon in Denmark — also with vendors and jousting and all  the fun of the fair — is also called ‘medieval.’ If you want more on that, I’ve linked to  a relevant Danish podcast in the notes.

It’s only in the US, apparently, that we decided  that no one had any fun in the Middle Ages ever, and therefore we needed Renaissance Festivals.

So  this episode is for exploring how the stateside Ren Faire got its start, and how it has more in  common with hippie communes than you might expect.

The first time I went to a Renaissance Faire,  I was about 7 years old, and I had no idea who Steeleye Span were.

So I had zero context  for anything, I was 100 percent sure that I actually met a witch, and I was of course  obsessed with the jousting.

In retrospect, my future as a medievalist was always in the cards.

Sorry for making you worry about my career choice, Mom — and thanks for all those drives to the PA  Ren Faire.

I have a special soft spot for the shire of Mount Hope, Pennsylvania, having attended  it with friends in high school and college, and, later, as a dancer — so if you’re listening to  this while road-tripping there, let me know!

So what is a Renaissance Faire?

Is it,  as one cultural commentator opined, the antithesis of a theme park?

In some  ways, some places, maybe.

Alternatively, it could be described as a theme park for nerds.

I’m not sure it’s accurate to call Ren Faires quieter than theme parks, but the sounds are  different, and it’s definitely a pre-industrial uproar.

There’s no hum of machinery; there are no  roller-coaster screams.

Such screaming as there is generally comes from excited spectators at jousts.

There’s — perhaps obviously — no piped-in music, but there might well be bagpipes.

In  my experience, Ren Faires are also pleasantly convivial spaces, where it’s easy  to strike up a conversation with a stranger, and you’re more likely to share space  than compete for it.

But defining the Ren Faire — where there are frequently themed  weekends for such things as pirates, dragons, and… Scots and Irish people, who notably exist  in the 21st century — remains challenging.

Rachel Lee Rubin, a professor of American  Studies, has described “Functional paradox” as “the stock-in-trade of the American  Renaissance faire.” And I think this gets at something important.

The mystery of how it  all functions has much to do, I would argue, with the degree to which the Renaissance Faire  has established itself as a cultural institution, with its own traditions and customs, and a set of  recognizable identities claimed by those who work, play, and sojourn there.

Elements of it  are similar to historical reenactment; elements of it are reminiscent of folk  festivals, or even theme parks.

In other words, it’s a distinctive cultural  phenomenon, where you might not only hear scenes from Shakespeare performed,  but also heckle Shakespeare personally.

One of the most surprising things I discovered  while researching this episode is that there is, apparently, some kind of educational goal  underlying — at least some — Renaissance Faires.

While I have always had a great time eating fried  vegetables and listening to folk music at them, and cheering appropriately for Good Queen  Bess and that upstart playwright William Shakespeare… I didn’t notice the educational  intent.

In the midst of finalizing my script, though, I met a representative of  the Arkansas Renaissance Faire, who, when I introduced myself as someone in charge  of a Medieval and Renaissance Studies program, enthusiastically volunteered that  there was such a goal.

Who knew!

My surprise here is, admittedly, professional.

It’s not that I don’t think people can enjoy history and flower crowns and fried vegetables  all at the same time.

All of these things are delightful.

But in my experience, there are  more history nerds and aficionados who say “Hey, let’s go to the Ren Faire!” than people who come  to the serious study of history by way of the faire.

There’s also the fact that I spend a lot  of time talking to people who are somewhere from mildly disgruntled to actively mad at me because  the history courses I teach are less like the imagined past than they expected.

Which is to  say: I think there’s a lot more to explore in the history of the Ren Faire than necessarily  in the Ren Faire’s relationship to history.

Kimberley Korol-Evans is one of the, so far,  comparatively few people who have researched the cultural phenomenon of the Renaissance Festival in  the US.

And she has called for more investigation of questions such as whether Renaissance Faires  set in differing fictive locations — England vs.

France — draw different visitors.

She has also  suggested that different eras of the English Renaissance, Henrician and Elizabethan, might  attract different patrons.

Now, I’m not sure about this, myself.

But maybe it’s only casual  faire-goers, like me, for whom “How far do I have to drive?” is the most significant Ren Faire  criterion.

And maybe more people than I suspect really do have big feelings about a Ren Faire set  during the reign of Henry VIII vs.

one set in the reign of Good Queen Bess.

The roots of the Ren  Faire as such are in part connected to education, but the Ren Faire itself was initially designed  as a place not primarily for educating people about the 16th century but as a place for escaping  from the twentieth… and rediscovering pleasure.

This is, in fact, where the hippies come into  it.

The first US Renaissance Faire came into being just outside Los Angeles — in 1963.

Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, as the poet Philip Larkin  would describe that pivotal moment in pop culture.

Change was everywhere.

In the case of the Ren  Faire, it just so happened to be heralded, in a more than usually literal sense, by trumpets  and banners.

The Renaissance Pleasure Festival of Laurel Canyon was founded by a couple with  a vision for how the faire could be both a haven for artists, and a place for envisioning an  alternative to the narrow cultural norms of 1950s suburbia.

“Through its willful turn to the old,”  as Rachel Lee Rubin has argued, it “became a place to experiment with the new.” It also became, from  its earliest days onward, what it has remained: a lot of different things to a lot of different  people.

It could be a safe space for veterans; a place for artisans to actually make money  from their skill in specialized crafts; a space to explore a range of options for inhabiting  gender.

Rubin has argued that the phenomenon of the Renaissance Faire helped to invent the  1960s as we know or remember them: as a decade

of experimentation: of rejection of recent norms,  and rediscovery of old traditions; of great music, whether the Child Ballads or the ballads of Bob  Dylan; and of fashion that wasn’t afraid of either color or medievalism.

Two years after the founding  of the Ren Faire, Allen Ginsberg, who saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness,  delivered a speech titled “Renaissance or Die.” The first Ren Faire, though, began on a much more  modest scale, with a commedia dell’arte cart and a vision for both education and play outside the  mainstream.

A bit of important historical context, here, is that 1963 was also a time when  Hollywood was still under the shadow of McCarthyism.

So there was an unusual  number of skilled actors, techs, artists, and organizers who were available to work  and interested in doing social commentary via whimsical satire — in the best medieval and  Renaissance tradition.

Now, that framing is mine, rather than that of the participants.

Show a  medievalist a political satire and we will say: aha!

What a great medieval tradition!

Which it is!

But participants in the first Renaissance Faire saw themselves as awakening from a second “Dark  Ages of McCarthyism.” The Renaissance, in other words, for the American cultural imagination, is  in a sort of sweet spot: providing an alternative to modernity while also imagined as a time and  place where you can have fun and also ideas.

Having fun is, in fact, crucial to the history  and present of the Renaissance Faire.

And it is also part of its subversive identity.

In the first  Ren Faire, this took the form of spoofing fears of communism by pointing out parallels to Elizabethan  anxieties about an “international heretical Spanish conspiracy.” At any faire, you’re likely  to find people exulting in both skills and identities that are often treated as peripheral  elsewhere.

You’ll also find people gently poking fun at the phenomenon of the Renaissance Faire  itself; the faire band Empty Hats, for instance, quips that they’ve been making quality music since  1564!

It is worth noting that music of all kinds has long been central to the faire experience.

There are pipes and flutes and hurdy-gurdies, and even the occasional shawm, but there are  also folk bands, continuing the early crossover between musicians who made music at or about  the early Renaissance Faires of the west coast, and those who used the instruments or inspirations  of the Renaissance in their own work.

The subgenre known variously as medieval folk, medieval  folk-rock, or most paradoxically, “medieval rock” owes much to the Renaissance Faire, as does the  subgenre of so-called “Celtic music.” Notably, the influences on this music are culturally as well as  chronologically diverse, with ouds and tambourines playing alongside violins, and electronic  drones alongside hand-carved wooden instruments.

This is one of the many things, I think, that  highlights not only the gaps between popular perceptions of the 16th century and its reality,  but also those interesting ones between its reality and how that reality is evoked at a Ren  Faire.

And this is one place where I differ in my conclusions from Kimberly Korol-Evans.

This may  have something to do with our different fields: her PhD is in theater and drama, while mine is in  history.

Maybe she’s just more of an optimist than I am.

But she tends to interpret the phenomenon  of the Ren Faire as more closely connected to the 16th century, and contributing to embodied  research on it, than I do.

It may also be that the Maryland festival, on which she based her  research, is quite unusually preoccupied with education for both its performers and its patrons.

I tend to align more with the interpretation of Rachel Lee Rubin, who has suggested that,  whatever the position of individual faire performers on the vexed question of authenticity,  what Ren Faires do really effectively is open a conversation about what the past was, and  about what we want from it in the present.

Ren Faires, moreover, can have distinctive  local cultures of their own.

This is showcased, for example, in the recent documentary  on the Texas Renaissance Festival, which is overseen by an eccentric who calls  himself a king and appears to be run with a lot less communal input by vendors and  performers than sixteenth-century peasants would have expected to have in the policies of  the landlords they dealt with.

And the local and regional contexts of the faires do matter to  the question of who comes.

But across faires, many patrons find excitement in liberation from  usual identities, and taking on other ones, with or without costumes — or garb, as it’s  known in this context.

And this can include a range of approaches to the opportunities of  the past, evoking not just a fairly narrow and historically Anglocentric segment of history, but  multiple cultures and even alternative histories.

Faires do still tend to be, to paraphrase Doctor  Who, whiter than the actual European past, but observation both anecdotal and anthropological  suggests that this is gradually changing.

In concluding her monograph on Renaissance  Festivals, Korol-Evans describes Faire patrons and performers as “a community of people who  celebrate the sixteenth century, in reality a world lit only by fire.” And I said “Awww” sadly  out loud.

Because the idea of premodern Europe as A World Lit Only By Fire is one of the hoariest  clichés of bad medievalism.

The implication, in the book of the same title, is that there  wasn’t very much fire, and you wouldn’t like what you saw by its light very much anyway.

(The book  was written by an excellent journalist who decided he was qualified as a historian for some reason.)  And as actual historians have been saying for a long time now, the image of a Middle Ages in which  “intellectual life had vanished from Europe” — I’m not kidding; the book actually says that —  simply isn’t accurate.

Or helpful.

And also, to be fair to Faire people (sorry about  the pun): I don’t think that what they, or we, are doing is as straightforward  as celebrating the sixteenth century.

At any Faire, there are silly songs and fairy  wings and fried food.

At many, there is jousting.

But also — both according to the published  scholarship, and in my own experience — there’s also at least some acknowledgment of imbalances  of power, and the very real sixteenth-century debates about how that power should be  exercised, and by whom.

Increasingly, too, there’s acknowledgment in the casting,  structure, and theming of Faire events — not just in the garb of attendees — that the world of  the sixteenth century was an interconnected one, where people were encountering each other in new  ways.

There’s a lot going on, in short.

And this, to me, is a significant part of the Ren Faire’s  distinctive charm, as a place where folk bands, Monty Python cosplayers, blacksmiths,  fortune-tellers, and even the odd historian all mingle in the same crowded, deliberately  playful space.

It is a place, as one interviewee beautifully put it, where it is hard to be  ashamed.

While its counter-culture roots may not always be visible, the Renaissance Faire, I would  argue, has developed a rich subculture of its own.

Before concluding, a special announcement:  Footnoting History is looking for a new host!

As regular listeners may have noticed, we’ve lost  Josh from our rota (alas), and while no one can replace his particular sense of humor about late  medieval politics, we are looking for someone else to join our ranks.

And you don’t have to be a  medievalist!

If you would love to be part of Footnoting History, and have a PhD in history,  or are getting a PhD in history, or have an MA in history that you've been wanting to do more  with, find the application form on our website.

If you don’t have post-graduate degrees  in history but would also love to be more involved with the podcast,  we’d love to have you as one of our Patreon supporters.

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As always, this and all of our episodes are available captioned on  our YouTube channel.

Thanks for listening,

and until next time, remember: the best  stories are always in the footnotes.