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So - what is it we do exactly? We are modern people who time-travel back into the context of a Victorian ideal of European High Medieval courtly life with chivalric ideals.
Who is a guest at this court? Everyone who plays in the SCA. The aspirational goals, set up for our peerage orders, and how our Royalty acts, and the rites that we re-enact over and over in court are all from the 60's hippie view of "The middle ages as they should have been", romantizied in pre-rafaelitic art and Arthurian literature.
Everyone single participant in the SCA are time-travellers from the modern world, and we can choose to also dress and research that particular time and place, or we can choose to research any other time or place in the world. The times and places further from this centre will be less frequent and more rare, but no less welcome, or valued. I have no quarrel with opening this to the entire world, cultures need not have had contact with Europe, but when we bring our personas to the SCA, we enter the context of the SCA.
The new writing of the Introduction to the Corpora entirely removes the central conceit, and the source of the goals to which we strive. Nowhere in the text can we read that we're a medieval recreation group, but it does say:
"These activities recreate aspects of the life and culture, dress, pastimes, and above all the chivalric ideals of the period, unifying our events and activities." (emphasis mine)
Nowhere up until this point or after is it defined which period, what place and what the ideals are that we recreate, and it implies that the chivalric ideals of all time and all places on earth up until the 17th century are the same, or comparable. This is a preposterous implication.
To my mind, it entirely removes the context for how we created our rituals, how we set up our pseudo-monarchies and group structures, and hollows the entire meaning of what we do.
As a new, prospective member, who might read this - how do you know what 'the chivalric ideals of the period' are if the time and the place is not defined anywhere? Why does the sentence quoted above continue after the next sentence "The current Middle Ages are ..."?
The context is entirely removed and it digs the heart out of what the SCA is. Without that context we can not unify our events and activities.
The proposed changes: https://www.sca.org/news/rfc-corpora-proposed-content-change-to-introduction-oct-1-2020/
The current document: https://www.sca.org/resources/document-library/govdocs/
Who is a guest at this court? Everyone who plays in the SCA. The aspirational goals, set up for our peerage orders, and how our Royalty acts, and the rites that we re-enact over and over in court are all from the 60's hippie view of "The middle ages as they should have been", romantizied in pre-rafaelitic art and Arthurian literature.
Everyone single participant in the SCA are time-travellers from the modern world, and we can choose to also dress and research that particular time and place, or we can choose to research any other time or place in the world. The times and places further from this centre will be less frequent and more rare, but no less welcome, or valued. I have no quarrel with opening this to the entire world, cultures need not have had contact with Europe, but when we bring our personas to the SCA, we enter the context of the SCA.
The new writing of the Introduction to the Corpora entirely removes the central conceit, and the source of the goals to which we strive. Nowhere in the text can we read that we're a medieval recreation group, but it does say:
"These activities recreate aspects of the life and culture, dress, pastimes, and above all the chivalric ideals of the period, unifying our events and activities." (emphasis mine)
Nowhere up until this point or after is it defined which period, what place and what the ideals are that we recreate, and it implies that the chivalric ideals of all time and all places on earth up until the 17th century are the same, or comparable. This is a preposterous implication.
To my mind, it entirely removes the context for how we created our rituals, how we set up our pseudo-monarchies and group structures, and hollows the entire meaning of what we do.
As a new, prospective member, who might read this - how do you know what 'the chivalric ideals of the period' are if the time and the place is not defined anywhere? Why does the sentence quoted above continue after the next sentence "The current Middle Ages are ..."?
The context is entirely removed and it digs the heart out of what the SCA is. Without that context we can not unify our events and activities.
The proposed changes: https://www.sca.org/news/rfc-corpora-proposed-content-change-to-introduction-oct-1-2020/
The current document: https://www.sca.org/resources/document-library/govdocs/
