From: graydon@micor.ocunix.on.ca (Graydon Saunders)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: personna
Date: 13 Apr 92 17:41:27 GMT
Organization: M.B. Cormier INC.

Greetings!

My self restraint having failed, I'm going to stick my oar into this
persona discussion.

Fra Tadhg seems to be operating out of some assumptions; firstly, that 
withholding information in a class implies malice, or at least contempt,
on the part of the withholding teacher, and secondly, that personna are
an attempt to *become* a medieval person.

The first assumption strikes me as very strange - any teacher has choices
about what to teach which depend on the purpose of the class - if I was
(so completely foolish as) to teach a class on Anglo Saxon poetry, it would
matter a lot if I was teaching an overview, or if I was trying to pass
on Tolkien's 'On Translating Beowulf' techniques for writing alliterative
verse in Modern English.   You seem to be arguing that if I *refer* to
type A stress pattern lines in an overview class, and don't go into the
full definition with numerous examples that would attend on the writing
class, I am deliberately keeping the students in ignorance.   I would
really like a full explanation of your reasoning for this.  Does the 
reaction change if I taught the class in the persona of, say, a Northumbrian
court poet who wanted you to know how to better recognize and appreciate
*good* poetry, but wasn't going to teach you to compose it because
earning a living is hard enough, thank you?


As for the second assumption - I had a bad time with the concept of
persona for the first four years I was in the SCA (i.e. up until about
six months ago), because I don't have the actor circuit in my head
and can't be anyone but me, and I was convinced that persona was an
excuse to be someone else for awhile.  Since most of us can't get our
whole selves out on the surface (as it were) at any given time, this
'being someone else' didn't strike me as problematical (for those
who could do it) until you get to the 'possible Medival person part'
- at that point, my history of English classes rise screaming out
of my memory and start to babble about things like views of the world
and god, class based societies, a plethora of now obscure philosophical
positions, and the side effects of very different living conditions.

So, of course you can't be a Medieval person; however, it looked like
a lot of people I respect, and some whom I know and like, thought you
could, and I was very reluctant to decide that they were all prey to
an idiocy.

What finally occured to me is that a persona is a (very) useful way to
organize information.

We tend to get into scholarly organization of information, almost reflexively
(how many years has the average scafolk spent in an educational institution?
20? maybe more? ), without thinking first about what we want to do with the
information.

Thing is, scholarly information isn't all that useful when you want to
make something - knowing the percentage of austentite in a piece of armor
tells you very, very little about how to make it, although it might tell
you something about what the authentic characteristics of the armor your
trying to make would be.

Similarly, knowing how many spare bowstrings Edward ordered for the Crecy
campaign tells me almost nothing about how many spare strings an archer
wanted to have on his person, *or* how many he actually had.  Did the
vintner carry the spares?  did you each have a spare? what?  If I'm
trying to accurately reproduce the dress and equipage of an English
archer of that period, this matters.  So do a lot of other things that
most scholars (intersted in the fates of armies) don't address - how
often could Daffyd the Archer expect to get new shoes?  how far did
they march in a day?  what did he get to eat, and what would he have 
*rather* had to eat?

In short, it is amazing how many things you didn't know you didn't know
until you try to *do* something.   A persona is a way to organize 
the information around medieval *doings*, rather than medieval *studies*.

Now if I could only decide when to be most concerned with... :]

Graydon
From: dlc@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Dennis Clark)
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 15:09:35 GMT
Subject: Re: Re: SCA in fiction - need help
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA