As we begin to research topics for our Renaissance Faire (Friday, September 28th), I found a nice site to use as a starting point. If anyone finds other useful resources that other groups could use, post them below in the comments section so that we can all benefit from them. I have also uploaded the Renaissance Faire packet in PDF format, should anyone need another copy.
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http://www.museangel.net/links.html#foodndrink
http://www.geocities.com/paris/1265/calcohol.html
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~vaasjoki/exlibris/medfood.html
Pennsic War is a massive (~12,000 people) hardcore renaissance-faire style event… from their site, I found a page containing massive numbers of links to other renaissance-faire sites. A lot of it is fluff (personal pages, pages about professional renaissance groups), but there’s probably going to be some kind of information (costumes, accents, weaponry info, etc) that would be useful to some group of wee sophomores.
http://www.kalani.net/FaireLinks.htm
Thanks for the helpful links Chris. Do I remember you being in a Roma group for the ML Ren. Faire? I ask because one of the groups in my class is planning on it, and any guidance or advice that you could give would be appreciated.
Yeah, my group played a group of Roma travellers. I’m not sure how well our group would have been scored by Mr. Roberts, (we had a sub that day who graded us rather subjectively, basically giving everyone an A+), but what we did was focus on legends and stories of the period, and then tell those stories while playing the role of a travelling Roma household. (We went around and told people stories.) This gave me the hilarious opportunity to tell people that Ken (asian) was my brother (I’m european-ish stock) and wes (looks like we’re related) was my half brother.
In other words, most of all have fun with this. If you make it a chore, you’ll regret it.
It depends on what your subject is. If it’s legends/stories, focus on that content, and don’t get caught up on the Roma identity issue as much. If your subject is Roma/Gypsy identity, culture, and customs, then focus on that first, find accurate information about it, and next find convincing and interesting ways (acting, props, attitude) to display that information.
There’s an ethnography the MLHS library should have, “The Traveller-Gypsies” by Judith Okely, 1983. I would check this out and read it. It’s about modern (as of 1983) gypsies, but the identity and taboo sections, as well as parts about cultural suppression by government authorities, should be very helpful and can be easily projected backwards. It’s an anthropology text, so I’m not if it’ll be harder to understand for non-anthropology students, but there’s a lot of useful info in it. For stories, we found various myths and legends and adapted them to our purposes – it’s not too hard, and it’s what the Roma would have done anyways.
As for props and such, don’t go overboard with it. You really should NOT have to spend money. Don’t let anyone in your group who insists you do force you to, seriously. I’ll just give the example of my group:
*PVC piping one of us already had made a frame over which we draped blankets and bedsheets to make a tent.
*A bunch of pillows and blankets got thrown inside for us to lounge around on. Shade! Also looked more period than everyone else’s REI tents or those green purchasable unfoldable tents.
*We each brought a bunch of trinkets, odds, and ends (wooden lobster, plastic katana sword, buddha figurines, shiny rocks, etc), which we set up near the open mouth of the tent. Each of these props could be somehow used in the stories we had memorized.
*We had homemade soup, two loaves of french bread, cheese, and apples to eat when we got hungry. (In ceramic bowls/containers.. wish we had had wooden spoons.)
*We gave out crowns of thorns (olive branches or something twisted into a crown).
*I brought a plastic crate I’d glued scrap wood to so it looked like a wooden crate. We kept the food under it and kept stuff on it.
*Ken plays the violin. So he brought his violin and played us fiddly tunes.
*We had cardboard trifolds with information we were presenting against the side of the tent and a nearby tree, so we could show it to the grading teacher and people who were interested, but it didn’t ruin the feeling of the tent for people not as interested in the specifics.
*Basically, the whole thing cost us 5-9 hours worth of time memorizing and prepping on weekends, and $2.50 for buying a large bedsheet to discolor and use for part of the tent. (I didn’t have enough blankets for inside AND for the tent.) It cost me some money for the food, but it was stuff that’s normally at my house anyways, so that doesn’t really count. And everyone there said our group was one of the awesomest looking, even if nobody had an attention span long enough to stick around and listen to stories of myth and yore :p.
Lastly, I’d work with the other groups – if there’s a tavern / entertainer group, maybe work out that you’ll send your best & most dramatic storyteller there sometimes to tell a story while one or more of their group comes over to your group to listen to a story, so you never just have a stream of random people walking by and never paying attention to what you’re presenting. If you just look at what other groups are doing, and think how you can work together with them, there’s a lot of cool things you can do.
Hey Chris. Thanks alot for the info. My group is doing more of a gypsy/witch type deal with magic and such but that site should help. and it would be good to have someone do some storytelling or something similar. And as for the props and stuff, thats just what we were going to do with the pillows and blankets and other such misc. items. But thanks. It helped to know that we werent the only crazy people wanting to do something like this
Thanks for all the info, Chris. It sounded like you had a ton of fun with your group. I’ll present the PVC pipe tent idea to my group. We really don’t want to buy a canopy, but we need one, because we’re doing food.
Hmmm… if you’re doing food, and use the setup I described, you’d probably want to use thin bedsheets for your canopy thingy rather than blankets; it’d weigh less than using blankets, and bedsheets tend to give more area than blankets, both things of which are vaguely important if you want people to be able to walk under it.
You also should test the design once before you assemble it at the rennfair. You might find you need to add triangle braces or something of the sort to keep it standing up.
Hahaha. Mr. Quale, are the pictures you posted from last year? Because I’m pretty sure thats me on crutches in the background of the second one…
They are indeed from last year; I have yet to post this year’s Faire. But enjoy your fifteen minutes . . .