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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1398074" data-attributes="member: 6533">Medieval as AlterityI have to agree with the majority of Wizard Dru's post.  The ideological component of the middle ages as a touchstone for fantasy should not be underestimated.There is no doubt that the middle ages mean something in a larger sense than simply being a refferant to a very long, varied, and critical period of human history.On the one hand there is the rejection of modernity, but there is also the sense that by returning to the middle ages an alternate reality might be claimed.  One that would expose and possibly rectify the problems of the current reality and history.That idea shows up again and again from SCA, Tolkien's second world aesthetic, many meta-theories on mideaval history, mideaval history, and to the very idea of Role-Playing itself.  So that the middle ages become not simply a stance for rejection and imagination but also a means of analysis.One point of disagreement I have with both WizarDru and Johnny Angel is the nature of historical anachronism within FRPGs.On the one hand there is a wide variety of diversity in FRPG and that is certainly reflect in the level anachronism.On the other hand, there is also an extremely high degree of variety within the historical conditions and interpretations of the period.  The period itself is fairly controversial, I, for instance, share the view with many other scholars, including CS Lewis, that the Renaissance is a primarily literary period with some notable and distinct aesthetic and ideological movements but otherwise not various enough to acquire a distinct period.  Similarly, there are massive debates over the quality of life, law, and hygiene in the period and plenty of evidence for either side or both sides of the mideaval was awesome vs. mideaval sucked ass debate.Both were probably true to varying degrees and at this point both count as highly suspect myths that are probably most useful for what they reveal about the politics and ideology of the people espousing them.On the gripping hand, it's hard to judge anachronism when you are talking about games that often harken back to the literature and mythology of the period as much as they do the history.  In fact, I believe many of these games use the histories as literature in their attempt to not so much mythologize the period as narratize it, and that's perfectly cool by me.History can't exactly be seperated from storytelling or vice versa and neither of them can really be seperated from play and imagination, and that's all right.</blockquote>

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