From: justin@inmet.camb.inmet.COM (Justin du Coeur MKA Mark Waks)
Subject: Inverted Pentacles; "Autocrat"; Dancing from Pictures; Waivers
Organization: The Internet
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 19:04:11 GMT

Re: Inverted Pentacles

Several people have pointed out that there is good reason to believe that
inverted pentacles did not have an *exclusively* sinister meaning in
period (it was used by clerics and the like). Question: is there any good
reason to believe that it *ever* had any satanic associations in period?
The received wisdom says so, but I can't recall ever seeing a period
illustration or text that implied such...

(This is *not* meant to have any bearing on whether or not it is an
appropriate symbol for SCA heraldry -- this thread has just gotten my
curiosity up...)


Re: "Autocrat"

Bill (our esteemed Keeper of the Mailing List) points out that the word
"autocrat" may be period, but our meaning of it ("person who runs events")
isn't.

Well, yes and no -- it's an interesting bit of etymology. As I've heard
it, the word dates from the very earliest events. In those days, the
Royalty hadn't fully been invented yet. They needed *someone* to be the
"ranking" person, so the person running the event was chosen, and given the
title "Supreme Autocrat". This *was* a reasonably appropriate use of the word,
but was quickly corrupted as our modern system of ranks and titles came
into being. The word "autocrat" continued to be attached to the person
running the event, but the connotations of being the Person In Charge
(in the recreative sense) were lost...

I don't *know* that this story is true -- my evidence is all anecdotal --
but I've heard it from a couple of sources, and it does seem to fit the
facts well. Dorothy? Hal? Any idea of whether this is true?


Re: Medieval Dance

Jeff Singman writes:
>Yes and no.  It is true that we lack actual contemporary instructions for
>dances prior to 1400.  For this reason, any attempt at reconstruction must
>be somewhat conjectural.  However, we have a substantial body of visual evi-
>dence which gives us quite a clear idea of medieval dances looked like 
>(though not how they moved).  Anyone who has done the Faeroese ring-dance,
>the Breton an-dro, or the Catalan sardana, has had an experience of a dance
>which, while not demonstrably medieval, is certainly medieval in form, and
>probably medieval in character or spirit.  It is rather a pity that dances of
>this sort are never actually done in the SCA, as they would give people a
>much better sense of the Middle Ages than, say, Hole in the Wall...

As you say, yes and no. The problem is that reconstruction from what a
dance looked like is decidedly tricky. Most medieval art isn't nearly
dynamic enough to give any real idea of the *feel* of a dance. From
a static viewpoint, an Italian ballo and a French pavan can look a lot alike.
But they're entirely different dances -- one lively and fairly bouncy,
with relatively defined steps, the other stately, with relatively simple
steps.

And as for the dances of various folk -- you may well be right that
some of these dances preserve the period spirit well, but it's very,
very hard to say which succeed, or *how* well. It's a slippery and
fairly dangerous concept, and only about two leaps of logic away from
asserting that Karabushka is period. (I've heard the "folk danced a
lot like this in period, so this dance is period" argument too many
times to count.) I'm not saying you're wrong, just that any demonstrations
of modern dances being "medieval in spirit" have to be couched in some
good explanations of *why* they are medieval in spirit, and real caution
in what conclusions you draw from that...

>As to the Saltarello, the dance is based partly on visual evidence of the
>15th century (the earliest period for which there survive any substantial
>number of illustrations of couple dances), and partly on a correlation of the
>shape of the music (known to be a 14th century dance tune) with the shape of
>better documented dances of the 15th and 16th centuries.  It was never ac-
>tually danced;  however, individual figures within it can be directly related
>to specific illustrations;  and the dance on the whole probably has a
>character similar to that of the livelier couple dances current in Northern 
>Italy around the year 1400.

Oh, I quite understand -- I wouldn't have published the dance if I didn't
think it was a *good* educated guess. But it's important to recognize that
it *is* a guess, and that you can't learn the same things from a 
speculative reconstruction as you can from a more grounded-in-text
one. One of the great dilemmas I face with the Letter of Dance is
deciding what documentation is good enough, and this is an issue I've
specifically had to deal with. There are a lot of people in the Society
who grew up on Mannschaft Pavan, who take for granted that pavans for
sets of couples are period. Similarly, I'd bet that there are a goodly
number of people in the Society who now take for granted that "step-
step-step-hop" is a Saltarello double, and probably even some who
assume that inner foot/outer foot is a standard model for medieval
dance.

The point is that we must be *quite* careful, when teaching speculative
reconstructions, to make clear what in the dance is fact, and what is
speculation. (Or where in that spectrum the elements lie.) In your dance,
the music is certainly period. The figures are more-or-less period, but
we don't know whether or not they were applied to the "Saltarello". The
steps are a good guess at period, but are based on what "saltarello"
meant a century later. (Plus the obvious derivation from the name.)
And the inner foot/outer foot business is, as far as I know, purely
an aesthetic decision. (Or is there a grounding here that I'm not
aware of?) This is qualitatively different from teaching, say, Arbeau,
where we can say with confidence that most aspects of the dances are
pretty much as it was done in period, at least insofar as Mssr. Arbeau
believed it to be done.

>Whether it is 'more wrong than right' is a
>matter of judgement;  but for a Society whose cut-off date is supposedly 1600,
>and whose focus is supposedly medieval, it is more right than the 17th cen-
>tury country dances (and 19th century folk dances) which tend to predominate
>SCA dancing.

A good argument, and one I have to largely agree with. I'm rather fond
of the Renaissance, so I don't much mind the fact that our dances start
at 1420. But you're right that the dances of the Renaissance were
probably quite different from those of the Middle Ages. (And even more
different were the dances of the Baroque, not that we do them right
anyway...)

>The sad fact is that we just don't have nice clear pre-1400 dance manuals.
>But this should not prevent people from using the sorts of sources which are
>available to us, as long as we don't delude ourselves into mistaking a con-
>jectural reconstruction for the real thing.

Yep. I don't want to sound like I'm discouraging conjecture -- indeed,
I think it's one of the ways in which the Society has something real
to offer, in that we're a lot more wiling to experiment with the scant
Medieval facts than most of the professional dance scholars. I just
want to emphasize the pitfalls of experimenting carelessly, which some
people certainly do...


Re: Waivers

Palymar argues that the centralized waiver system, attached to memberships,
simplifies things on many levels.

I don't doubt it. The question is, is it the *only* way to do it? Here's
an alternate proposal:

-- The waiver be attached to a membership card, as it has been, and comes
   implicitly with a membership. Thus, any fighter having a valid
   membership is dealt with.
-- *And* any fighter who is *not* a member can get a waiver card, by paying
   an appropriate processing charge. It isn't reasonable that waivers
   be free, since there is *some* overhead involved. On the other hand,
   it shouldn't cost more than a buck or two for processing the thing.
   (If it costs more than that, we've got gross incompetence to worry
   about.)

These waivers-without-memberships would work right through the same
offices as memberships. They wouldn't be an undue burden, because they
should just be replacing some memberships, which are certainly more
work to process. They wouldn't be a financial drain on the paying
members, because the people using them would be paying their own way.
And they would only cost about a fifth as much, which can make a
difference for a poor college student about whether this hobby is
worth taking up or not.

Can anyone come up with an argument *against* this proposal, that
doesn't involve moralizing "you should be supporting the Corporation"
arguments? If you *must* insist that fighters help pay for the
insurance (which, note, is not part of the current argument), then
add another buck onto the cost of the waiver card -- it's still only
a fourth the price of a membership.

				-- Justin du Coeur
				   Can you tell that I'm in favor
				     of unbundling the system? I
				     knew you could...

Random Quote du Jour:

"Did alien comic book writers really visit ancient cultures and teach them 
 how to sneak over the fourth wall? (See Captain Mayan #fish-eagle-dot-dot)"
		-- Lance Smith
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