Renaissance Festivals: Merrying the Past and Present

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This is an ethnographic study of contemporary American Renaissance fairs, focusing on the Maryland Renaissance Festival, in which participants recreate sixteenth-century England through performances of theater, combat-at-arms, processions, street hawking, and meticulously faithful historical reconstructions. It is also partly an autobiographical account of interactive improvisation, subcultures within the festival framework, delineation between living history and historical elaboration, and new understanding of performer and patron immersion into varying degrees of the willing suspension of disbelief.