Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: What is Period, and what's not...and Various.
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 1992 16:20:30

Fra Tadhg Liath unto Haj Hossein Ali Qomi and all others unto whom these presents shall have come giveth greeting.

 TN> Ah, pithy Tadhg, well done, if your very-to-the-point
 TN> rejoinder to the query about Rome and period were
 TN> directed at the Western Republican and Imperial Roman
 TN> nonsense we have been seeing of late.

Presumably that was what the questioner meant. Of course, the term "Rome" covers a multitude of ... well, things.

 TN> However, I do point
 TN> out that the Eastern Empire -- which I grant has rather a
 TN> more Greek than "Roman" flavor to it -- is entirely
 TN> temporally appropriate, and those who would wish to
 TN> pursue more Western European personae while remaining
 TN> in a Byzantine framework might locate in those parts of
 TN> Italy, Spain and North Africa which remained Eastern
 TN> Imperial until the 9th century.

Indeed.

 TN> I am inclined to take issue with Fra Tadhg's somewhat too
 TN> pithy reply to the tale of the lecture on Anglo-Saxon
 TN> poetry.

Um? It is my general position that "persona games" are nonsense. If everyone in the SCA were willing to adopt an early 7th century persona, I'd be happy to "be in persona" all of the time. Since it ain't gonna happen, it's silly for me to act as if it has. I've watched His Grace the Duke Sir Cariadoc push that particular rope for years; as with a centrally planned economy, temporary local successes don't alter the fact that in the long run it's doomed to failure by inherent structural weakness.

My persona is not *who I am* but rather *who I was* before I got to the Current Middle Ages. That is the only approach to "persona" that can be successfully implemented in the SCA, because it's the only one that possesses a theoretical basis to cope with anachronism.

 TN> However, I think it is equally useful to attempt to re-create
 TN> the ambience and content of medieval university
 TN> education and to do so in persona.

Practical training in how to cope with frustration aside, I fail to see what is useful about failing to give a student knowledge that one possesses merely because some theoretical personality construct wouldn't know it.  That was the idea my response was calculated to communicate.

 TN> For example, I am
 TN> currently teaching a series of courses in persona in the
 TN> University of Atlantia's Trivium and Quadrivium program
 TN> on Logic and Rhetoric which reading the texts of
 TN> Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Rhetoric to the students,
 TN> while providing an interspersed commentary employing
 TN> standard commentaries available in the late 13th and early
 TN> 14th centuries, as well as Hossein Ali Qomi's insights as a
 TN> philosopher and theologian ...

A useful thing that could be done just as easily by Hossein the Atlantian as Hossein the Saracen.

 TN> I would hope as learned a fellow as Fra Tadhg would not
 TN> dismiss this latter approach quite so flippantly.

As indeed I did not - I have naught but praise for this approach, so long as it doesn't entail withholding knowledge on such specious grounds as that advanced by the teacher mentioned in the message to which I was responding. The hours that we spend "in persona" are few, and precious, and anything that restricts the free flow of information is an abomination.

 * Origin: Herald's Point * Steppes/Ansteorra * 214-699-0057 (1:124/4229)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca