“I give you my armour, I give you my glory…”

Back in December, when I picked up a mid-1960s Polaroid Land Camera at an antique shop in Savannah, I was eager to see if I could restore a neglected contraption to life—and of course, in keeping with the long-running theme of this blog, I wondered: Could it be used to find new angles on American medievalism?

A Land Camera is not versatile. There’s a manual focus bar, a two-option “lighting selector,” a wheel that makes pictures lighter and darker, and an electric eye that presumes to do the squinting for you. Development time depends on the air temperature, and each print leaves behind a photographic placenta in strips of chemical-drenched litter.

I don’t aspire to be a photographer; I’m learning how to use only this type of camera, with all its quirks and severe limitations. Quite a few people purport to post “Land Camera” photos online, but the artsiest shots are often produced by old cameras modified with newer professional lenses or attachments that let you use Polaroid instant film with sophisticated SLRs. That’s cheating. I want to coax good photos out of this clunker exactly as it is. Using a Land Camera is like writing a poem within strict formal constraints: Certain flourishes are simply impossible—but if we practice a little, what can we make it do?

With form in mind, but without further ado, here a few of my first decent attempts to capture day-to-day medievalism through the lens of an obsolete Polaroid. (Click on each photo to see a larger version.)

* * *

Every Easter, the All Hallows Guild at Washington National Cathedral plants gorgeous rows of tulips along the northern border of the Bishop’s Garden. This year, I saw Easter Sunday as an opportunity to test the Land Camera’s eye for color.

This picture was taken just to the right of the cathedral’s charming and temperamental medlar tree. That’s a 15th-century granite bas relief in the background; in the foreground, a weather-worn 13th-century limestone capital from Cluny now does humble duty as a birdbath.

When Fuji decides to stop producing this last line of color film for old Polaroids, the camera that took this photo will immediately become less useful after only five decades than this capital remains after 800 years.

* * *

Polaroid didn’t offer an extensive line of accessories for the Land Camera, but their add-ons did include a “close-up kit” consisting of a snap-on lens and viewfinder for subjects 9 to 15 inches away. Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land was an optics genius; the camera’s bulk and its imprecise focus lever make the macro kit hilariously difficult to use, but it’s remarkable that such a lens exists for this camera at all.

I know what you’re thinking: “But Jeff, everyone knows that gnomes aren’t medieval! They spread across 19th-century Europe, especially France and England, after becoming highly popular home and garden decorations in German-speaking lands during the 18th century!”

Yes, that’s true—but see those tiny purple flowers? This is actually a photo of a patch of alehoof, the mint-like weed the Anglo-Saxons used in place of hops to give their ale its bitterness. The gnome? Totally just wandered into the shot.

* * *

This statue in front of the Embassy of Croatia is one of my favorite modern interpretations of a saint. It depicts a naked St. Jerome hunched over a large book and clearly in the midst of some unknowable fugue of frustration, perplexity, and fascination. That’s also the pained posture my grad-school friends and I assumed when we struggled our way through Jerome’s complex, sophisticated Latin.

At the mercy of the position of the sun and an old camera that over-emphasizes shadows, I’ve returned several times to try to re-do this shot. It’s not quite right, but I like the angle, and the suggestion, at first glance, of a larger story.

* * *

“…but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shall be wel.”

Sometimes you get lucky. In the crypt of the National Cathedral, there’s a stark little chapel lit only by indirect sun. On a frigid January afternoon, on one of my first Polaroid outings, I leaned on a pew and impulsively took a picture of a statue of the Good Shepherd. The resulting image stunned me; I couldn’t do it again if I tried.

Earlier this year, Fuji stopped making this fast black-and-white film, and I’ll deplete my own hoard of the stuff by early next year. Until then, I’ll expand my repertoire of tricks, try to reframe medieval-ish subjects when I see them, and keep learning how to use this camera based on what shadow and sunlight demand.

“Dust you down from tip to toe…”

[Matters of health and wealth—or, to be clearer, a pronounced lack of both—have kept this blog silent for longer than I’d like, so here’s a timely but updated post from 2012.]

For seven years, this blog has argued that medievalism is durably American. From Gothic synagogues in the South to killer queens in New Jersey, from Cajun jousters and the saints of New Orleans to the gargoyles of Perth Amboy, from rivalries on the Potomac to dragons and Vikings at seaside resorts, from late-blooming scholars on postage stamps to courtly love on General Hospital, American medievalism is rooted in an unresolvable clash of classical and medieval aesthetics, the persistence of religious traditions, and complex nostalgia for Europes that never were.

But did it have to take root in my garden?

Meet Glechoma hederacea, the mint-like ground ivy called “creeping Charlie” in the United States and known, at least around my place, as “existence’s bane.” Rampant, sinister, nigh-unstoppable, this weed was brought to North America by early European settlers, who presumably appreciated its value as ground cover and its not-unpleasant scent.

Medieval people found Glechoma hederacea medicinally useful, as shown by a drawing of the stuff in a tenth-century manuscript from Constantinople. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can buy a watch and other jewelry based on its depiction in a 15th-century woodcut, gifts apparently intended for people who’ve never torn intractable fistfuls of the stuff from the contumacious earth.

More interesting is its etymology in England, where it’s known as Gill-on-the-ground or, intriguingly, alehoof. Britten and Holland’s 1886 A Dictionary of English Plant-Names claims the word comes from “‘Ale-hoove,’ meaning that which will cause ale to heave, or work,” because in an era sans hops, the Anglo-Saxons used the plant to give their ale its bitterness. (The 2007 Dictionary of Plant Lore quips, too defensively, that “there have been other attempts at its etymology which may safely be ignored.”) The Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary finds the plant simply called “hófe,” with references to mersc-hófe, “marsh-hove,” túnhófe, “yard-hove,” brúnhofe, “brown-hove,” and phrases in medicinal texts such as genim hófan, “take hove.” If *ealu-hófe was an Old English word, no written trace of it survives.

The word may be gone, but the plant endures, creeping just beneath the soil, breeding pernicious new nodes as it roams. You can slow its advance, but smother it in mulch and it summons demonic strength and pushes ever upward. Like a neglected chip of pure evil smoldering in a toaster oven, alehoof is almost impossible to eliminate. “[P]ut every scrap of the plant in a bag and throw it away,” one site advises, “or it will reroot and take over again.” Other sites suggest tracing the runners several feet to their origin and, like Beowulf before you, destroying the monster’s mother, even if doing so leaves craters in your lawn.

Whatever medicinal purposes medieval people found in alehoof, it’s now thought to be toxic in large amounts. And don’t be fooled by those dainty, bumblebee-pleasing flowers; when alehoof goes berserk, as it did in a neighboring plot, it can help bring down an unsturdy fence.

It’s enough to make a despondent gardener fall back on an Old English plea to the forgotten goddess Erce:

Geunne him,
ece drihten,
(and his halige
þe on heofonum synt),
þaet hys yrþ si gefriþod
wið ealra feonda gehwaene,
and heo si geborgen,
wið ealr bealwa gehwylc,
þara lyblaca geond land sawen.

[“Grant to him, eternal ruler (and his holy ones, who in heaven are), that his ploughing be protected against any and all enemies and it be guarded against each and every evil, against those spells sown through the land.” trans. K.A. Laity]

Or maybe, in the proper spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, magic needs to surrender to stoicism. “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds,” shrugged a poet who put words in the mouth of a king. Like medievalism, alehoof has taken perennial root; from gift shops to gardens, it’s fated not to fade.

“Oh, we won’t give in, let’s go living in the past…”

Because I’m always on the lookout for medievalism, I was naturally drawn to Tod Wodicka’s 2008 novel All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, with its gloriously unmarketable title based on a famous line from 14th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich. I expected an enjoyable story that didn’t show much awareness of medievalism or the Middle Ages, but instead I found just the opposite: characters and a plot that didn’t thrill me, but which were wrapped up in fresh, perceptive ideas about why some Americans throw themselves headlong into the medieval past.

The narrator of All Shall Be Well, homely and awkward 63-year-old Burt Hecker, owns an inn in upstate New York, but the true focus of his life is the Confraternity of Lost Times Regained, the medieval living-history society he founded in 1965. Burt makes his own clothing, brews his own mead, treats ailments with pinches of herbs, and spurns potatoes because they’re OOP, “out of period.” He’s the father of medieval reenactment in America but a lousy family man in every other respect. His son is a brilliant but deeply introverted musician, his daughter is a resentful sci-fi geek, his mother-in-law is obsessed with the persecution of her Carpathian countrymen—and all of them hate his guts.

The American wretch pining for the Middle Ages has become a recognizable literary type—think Miniver Cheevy or Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces—and there are obvious hints of Ignatius in Burt. He dislikes the modernity of California, reacts prissily to a Prague strip club, and regrets when necessity pulls him “toward the crashing promiscuity of the century waiting outside.” Unfortunately, his persnickety moralism is too inconsistent to be plausible, and any comparison with Confederacy would be misleading. All Shall Be Well isn’t anti-heroic farce; it’s a novel about alcoholism, family estrangement, and the burdens of the past. Much of the laughter here is rueful.

As Burt plods through a series of misadventures—in Europe in the 1990s and in flashbacks in upstate New York—we learn about his past, particularly the incidents that made his family flee. Can several strong, strange personalities forgive each other when the one woman who held them together is dead and gone? Wodicka doesn’t seem to know, and I confess that between Burt’s awkward passivity and the dislikability of his family, I was tempted not to care. Fortunately, All Shall Be Well takes on, however indirectly, a bigger and more interesting question.

Throughout literature and pop culture, medieval reenactors and Ren Fest aficionados tend to get one of two treatments: They’re either enlightened oddballs whose willful weirdness makes them morally superior to the rest of us Muggles, or they’re portrayed as dysfunctional losers who couldn’t possibly hold jobs, have sex, or survive in the world. Wodicka toys with both of these notions, but he sees that there’s more to American medievalism than mere escapism. He’s sensitive to the disorientation and frustration of “historically displaced people”—but he’s blunt about them too.

When Burt falls in women whose medieval music-therapy workshop focuses on Hildegard of Bingen, he finds them silly, but also he appreciates their need to decorate their inner lives with medieval spolia:

And though Hildegard affirmed the lowliness of womankind and the subjugation of female sexuality, Tivonia and the girls saw her as a proto-feminist New Age icon, not the Catholic scold she undoubtedly was. No matter. History is ever ours for the reliving . . . To the girls, the medieval woman was a person capable of great self-assertion, so they studied what they believed to be instances of this, ferreting out kernels of sassiness from the most minor of references, building a fairy-tale history and peopling it with sisters-in-arms. The medieval woman was them, only more real. Them, with a less cluttered connection to the eternal.

When Burt and the tunic-clad singers arrive in Germany as emissaries from the “vulgar, unself-conscious land of American make-believe,” he discerns that the medieval world exists far more vividly in his own imagination than in the European landscape outside the car window:

I plunge my thoughts back into the roadside tumult of greens and browns. How to reconcile these lands, this scroll of Bundesrepublik Deutschland with my Middle Ages? It happened here once. But where? Despite the castles and churches, and all those townships still adhering to thousand-year-old plans, modern Germany seems a most non-historical kingdom. Safe, well-ordered, tame, all mystery long since burned away in the conflagrations of this last century.

Wodicka has noticed, rather astutely, that Americans can write themselves into an ersatz Middle Ages unburdened by actual history. For us, medievalism is personal; for Europeans, it’s unavoidably political.

Burt’s mother-in-law drives this point home. Snarling and confrontational, Anna lives for the thankless task of donning her folk costume to tell the world about the persecution of her own Lemko people in the Carpathian Mountains. Her cause is righteous, but Wodicka, in an effective bit of dark humor, portrays the Lemko as backwards and cruel, making Anna a one-woman living memorial to people no one else cares to remember. Her nationalism and ethnic pride are, as these things tend to be in Eastern Europe, a dead end—but Burt wonders, in a moment of clarity, if his own frivolous approach to history mocks her cause.

Does whimsical reenactment of the past belittle real people who suffered and died? I’ve never seen this question asked in fiction, and I’ve rarely seen reenactors or their critics address it. “I believe that some of us were ourselves only during the act of re-enacting,” Burt says, arguing out that daily life is already a series of masks, costumes, and roles, even as he concedes that he may have taken it way too far. As he tries to reconcile with his family, he describes them as “twenty yards and six hundred years away,” finding in history an unfortunate metaphor for the awful consequences of his actions.

Although I wanted a more decisive plot, I found plenty to like in All Shall Be Well, including some good writing in two harrowing deathbed scenes and a beautiful prose poem from the perspective of Hildegard of Bingen that frames the entire book. Wodicka has thought deeply about how Americans mash-up European history to give their lives meaning, and his conclusions are stark: We don’t reenact the past, but reinvent it for our own purposes; eccentrics can cause their loved ones terrible pain; and there’s only so much hope for the unfortunate souls trapped in “the rotting present of of a life lived perpetually out of period.”

“Safe were the folk words of truth would upset…”

Baltimore is a rewarding place to hunt for traces of the Middle Ages, from the extensive collection at the Walters Art Museum to the ersatz medievalism of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower —but a few weeks ago, in a redeveloped circle where the Inner Harbor meets Fells Point, I was struck by a column of burning knights.

Conquistadors? Crusaders? No—they represent something far more serious than I’d expected to find alongside J. Crew, Starbucks, and Haagen-Dazs.

That’s the National Katyn Memorial, designed by sculptor Andrzej Pitynski and dedicated in 2000. It reminds the world that in 1939 and 1940, the Soviets massacred thousands of Polish military officers, most of them reservists—teachers, doctors, priests, rabbis, lawyers, and civil servants who resisted Stalinist indoctrination in prison camps. For decades, the Soviet secret police tried to cover up the slaughter.

Putin’s Olympics are a fitting time to remember the Katyn massacre. You can learn more about it at the National Katyn Memorial website, the National Archives, and the PBS website—but what makes this memorial a suitable subject for this blog is its medievalism.

According to the plaque beneath the sculpture, the 44-foot flame symbolically “envelops the Katyn martyrs . . . and raises them spiritually into the pantheon of national heroes of Poland.” Three Polish officers (including the only known female victim) burn at the base, while other bound victims writhe higher up.

Throughout the flames stand the souls of medieval knights.

On the right is Boleslaw the Brave, the first crowned king of Poland, born in the year 967. Alongside him is Zawisza the Black, the 15th-century knight who died trying to keep the Ottoman Turks out of the Balkans. Elsewhere, you’ll find King Wladyslaw III, who also died fighting the Turks in 1444, plus a few more recent heroes: Jan Sobieski, Kasimir Pulaski, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

The Katyn Memorial is sobering, but at 44 feet high, it also conveys heroic permanence. We now expect atrocities to be memorialized through grim slabs of black marble with no features other than the names of strangers, but here, recognizable human figures united by defiant nationhood illustrate an ongoing story of human evil purified by the fires of patriotism.

When medievalism flares in central and eastern Europe, it’s rarely charming: Ossetian separatism, Kyrgyzstani terrorism, Serbian nationalism, royal Ukrainian saints who buried their enemies alive—the list goes on, and it’s not confined to the largely benign medievalism that thrives in the United States.

It’s an old story in Europe: Leaders rally their restless tribes by exploiting their medieval roots. What’s happening in Baltimore is more typical of the way America tempers medievalism: The worst burns away, leaving the laudable goal of simple remembrance.

“But I say it’s only mountains and the sea…”

Nestled in the Caucasus like a goblet of leopard blood in Vladimir Putin’s mailed fist, Sochi is basking in worldwide attention. The Black Sea site of the Winter Olympics is just up the coast from the Georgian border, and the media is starting to ponder this umbrous and ungenteel land: Sky News offers a primer on the violent history of the Caucasus, al-Jazeera reports that a “forgotten insurgency” called the Caucasus Emirate is simmering, and the National Geographic website reminds readers that the Caucasus are a “cauldron and pretty unstable” and that “the games themselves are reigniting deep enmity.”

Dutiful and dull, these news reports fail to capture the sheer sheep-face stew of regional history. For that, you need to seek out one of the great, gonzo books about the Caucasus: W.E.D. Allen’s A History of the Georgian People.

Published in 1932, Allen’s tome was once the standard history of Georgia in English, but the author of a recent survey calls it “antiquated.” Perhaps he’s thinking of passages like this one:

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!

I’m kidding—but only a little. Here’s W.E.D. Allen’s take on the Caucasus in the 7th century B.C.:

And when the Swarming Time was over, and men began to rule in cities, and others to write again, these shifting peoples emerge into the light of history; with changed names, moulding languages and old traditions, borrowed from the word-of-mouth anthologies of conquerors and conquered, woven to the doubtful fabric of a common history.

Here’s Allen’s snappy summary of how a medieval quasi-state emerged in the Caucasus:

For two generations or more there were difficult manoeuvres, obscure dynastic skirmishes, ferocious little wars between the pushful princes of young mediaeval Georgia.

Here’s Allen’s description of the Georgian national character, which I think he considers flattering:

The Georgians retain in a remarkable degree, both individually and as a people, the clear and gentle outlook, the free and inquiring intelligence and the high amoral and untrammelled mind of primitive man. The generosity, the loving simplicity and the humanity, the animal love of life which characterizes the Homeric poems and the ancient literature of the Celts and Scandinavians lights the pages of the mediaeval Georgian epics and declares indeed the mind of the Georgian these days.
…
At the same time the climate is a mellow joyous climate and the wine is good, so that neither the air nor the diet are conducive to the worrying over principles and the gnawing over grievances.

And here—and oh, how I love this one—is Allen’s ode to the ancient city of Kutais:

In the last foothills of the Caucasus fineing to the Colchian plain, in the sparkling sunshine, the river gleaming past down from the mountains to the sea, the lovely city stretches lazy brave and laughing, like as it were to some free woman who has known so many grasping dirty masters, and remains fresh in all her shame.

I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to find an affectionate city-as-whore simile in an overview of Georgian history. By that point, I was lost in a twisting maze of tribes, dynasties, and place-names—but I was also determined to find out what Allen, with his own strange sense of decorum, intended to swoon over next.

Who was W.E.D. Allen? Born in 1901 to Ulster Protestant stock, Allen was the Eton-educated scion of a printing-and-advertising family. In addition to A History of the Georgian People, which he wrote when he was 29, his scholarly work included the much-touted Caucasian Battlefields and the journal Georgica. Allen served as a war correspondent, worked for the Foreign Office in Beirut, Mosul, and Ankara, and endowed the National Gallery in Dublin with Orthodox icons and other treasures, many of which he had found being sold as “debris” in Istanbul bazaars. At the time of his death in 1972, his private library on Russia and the Caucasus was hailed as “probably one of the best on the subject outside the Soviet Union.” Allen also represented West Belfast in Parliament as an independent Unionist, and—although his scholarly biographer passes over the fact in silence—he was a behind-the-scenes Fascist who wrote for the periodical The Blackshirt under a pen name.

What Allen’s biography doesn’t tell you is that A History of the Georgian People is not a logical endeavor. No, it’s a glorious mess—a rhapsodic brain-dump by a scholar so sunk in his subject that he can no longer outline it for newcomers. Calling his own treatment of Georgia “horizontal rather than chronological,” Allen assumes his readers possess encyclopedic knowledge of Caucasian, Byzantine, and Middle Eastern history. His narrative, too detailed to convey the wider drama and too burdened by minutiae to be novelistic, often gets ahead of itself: Why herald the death of King Bagrat III—a would-be Charlemagne of the Caucasus—when you haven’t yet told us who he was?

I’ve found it impossible to get more than 100 pages into Allen’s history, but I confess that with the regret of a traveler who longs to return to some far-flung place. I’m beguiled by the promise of more florid musings like this:

Here are no serried ranks of causes and effect, no steady march of progress, no smug train of evolution. All the nations of the world have drifted through the Caucasus; all their leavings are to find—but little has been built. Here are the ways of God and men, most horrible and lovely, uncertain and not comprehensible. Such things we may contemplate, learn somewhat, understand a little, and wonder at the colour and the clouding and the sun upon it all.

A History of the Georgian People may be obsolete, but only as scholarship. As a love letter to the Caucasus, it’s remarkable—and, like a love letter, it’s worth digging out every now and again for the lingering whiff of a past that refuses to die.

“And it’s true, if all this around us is paradise…”

I don’t actively look for these things. No, sometimes I just happen to be visiting family in New Jersey when I pull off the highway to skirt some traffic, drive through an unfamiliar downtown, and HOLY CROW—

This glorious seventeen-minute Thompson Twins dance remix of a house was built in 1892 by the local mortician as a wedding gift for his bride. All of the other mansions on Stockton Street in Hightstown gaze on it in wonderment and envy, because even though the asymmetrical Elmer Rogers House isn’t really Gothic in design (it’s more of a Queen-Anne’s-flashy-American-cousin), check out what it does have.

Monsters on the roof!

Leering beasties on the highest peaks!

A wingèd sentinel eyeing intruders with eerie patience.

Every shingle, every tile, every baluster and brace sports a carefully chosen color, and other photos show that the flags and awnings change with the seasons. (The house is also festooned with little fleurs-de-lys.)

The front yard is a choreographed riot of medievalism: an angel, a saint…

…a gryphon…

…and dragons.

So why has the Rogers House spawned a quasi-medieval fantasy world? Maybe that round turret screams “castle” to the current owners, or perhaps the meticulous, old-fashioned care necessary to restore and curate such a monumental home feels “medieval” to Americans who are inclined to collapse the past into a blur of “olden times,” when skilled craftsmen begat gargoyles, dragons, angels, and saints.

Or maybe their motive is more timeless. People variously perceive the medieval world as teetering between austerity and chaos, ignorance and enlightenment, but the owners of the Rogers House endorse a different predilection, one that’s never as common as it ought to be but which does have its place in the Middle Ages, as long as you know where to look: a pure, prismatic delight.

“…and in a yellow taxi turn to me and smile…”

As the Dennis DeYoung of medievalism-themed blogs, “Quid Plura?” loses its voice from time to time, only to come screaming back amid synthesizer-fueled fanfare. These days, I’m working on two books, one of them a translation of a medieval poem, but blogworthy medievalism is never far from my mind—because I live in what is arguably the most medieval neighborhood in Washington.

I’ll show you what I mean. First, hike uphill through my substitute for a back yard, a nature conservancy named for a 13th-century Welsh market town…

…to emerge beneath the watchful eyes of these elementary school elves…

…before we hurry past the castellated, gargoyle-festooned (and recently shuttered) preachers’ college…

…to explore the grounds of our neighborhood English Gothic cathedral (shown here pre-earthquake)…

…with its thriving garden devoted in part to Walafrid Strabo, tutor to Charlemagne’s grandson…

…and decorated with a medlar tree right out of Chaucer and a worn capital from the monastery of Cluny, all of it just footsteps from a tree grown from the Glastonbury Thorn…

…and across from an apartment house with a Gothic, grotesque-festooned facade.

Touring romanticized reminders of medieval culture can be tiring, so trudge downhill and relax with a pot of mussels and Belgian beer at a joint named for a mash-up of the Merovingian Saint Arnulf of Metz and an 11th-century saint from Soissons.

Last week, I stopped to gawk at a troupe of Morris dancers outside a nearby pub, and sometimes there’s a bust of Dante in a shop window down the block—but why chase them down? I won’t soon run out of material, and this unlikely pageant of saints, gargoyles, and European ghosts only makes it easier to work on medieval-themed books. Even in a neighborhood where few others hear them, the echoes of the Middle Ages never end.

“Where the scent of wild roses turns the milk to cream…”

What hath the Renaissance faire to do with psychedelic rock? The vogue for “world music”? The frilly shirts of Jimi Hendrix? The rise of craft breweries? The House Un-American Activities Committee? Before reading Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, I hadn’t thought to ask—but Rachel Lee Rubin’s book is a useful reminder that pseudo-medieval pursuits are sometimes more about the present than they are about the past.

Rubin starts with the basics: how the first faire grew out of a children’s commedia dell’arte troupe organized at a California youth center by teacher Phyllis Patterson. In May 1963, Patterson and others organized the first “Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market” as a fundraiser for left-wing Pacifica Radio, drawing more than 3,000 revelers to a North Hollywood ranch. Associated with hippies and drugs by local detractors, the event quickly outgrew Pacifica. It spawned its first imitators in Minnesota and Texas in the early 1970s; more than 200 Ren fests of varying sizes now thrive across the United States.

So how did a countercultural crafts-and-music romp evolve into a nationwide subculture overseen, in some cases, by a large entertainment corporation? Well Met doesn’t chart the growth and commercialization of the Ren faire. Instead, Rubin has two goals: to explain “the ways in which various forms of cultural expression ‘tried out’ first at the faire became recognizable staples of American social and cultural life,” and to restore the Renaissance faire to a central place in the history of the counterculture. Once I got past my initial disappointment that the book wasn’t a history, I was won over by Rubin’s argument for the importance of the Renaissance faire to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s—and its long-overlooked ubiquity.

Her evidence is legion: how the Los Angeles Free Press began as the Ren faire newspaper; how Americans, who now consume beer from nearly 2,500 craft breweries, first sampled ale at the faire; how fashion choices and even the typefaces on psychedelic album art recall early faire fliers; how the faire anticipated renewed markets for handmade crafts and set precedents for large outdoor rock concerts; how occasional faire-goer Michael Jackson mimicked the moves and style of faire mime Robert Shields; how the Flying Karamazov Brothers, the Firesign Theater, and Penn and Teller all got their start at Ren faires; and how the faire coincided with a Middle Eastern cabaret boom in California that helped build an audience for international music. Rubin even suggests that the Ren faire helped revive interest in the klezmer. Who knew?

Although Well Met is packed with wonderful “aha!” moments, the book does wander. Sometimes, disorganization drives Rubin to interesting places, as when she asks black faire-goers and plus-sized women about their experiences, or when she randomly chats up knights and wenches about the faire as a gay-friendly environment, a refuge for misfits, and an escapist haven where costumes deliberately obscure real-world class signals. At the same time, there’s way too much detail about the history of a couple of psychedelic bands, and a chapter about Ren fests in fiction feels like a conference paper brought in to serve as padding. It’s particularly jarring when patches of academic jargon turn up in such an accessible and pleasantly written book, as when Rubin muses on “the ways in which the faire has enabled (perhaps paradoxical) strategies of resistance to the very forces of corporatism and cultural centrism that have inexorably resituated it in the American expressive landscape.” Surely there’s a less turgid way to say that.

Well Met also frustrated me with the tantalizing questions it doesn’t ask. Rubin mentions conservative critics of those first California Ren faires, but she provides almost no information about or firsthand commentary from them. Why not? Did neighbors’ complaints about traffic, drugs, and crime have no validity? Picking though pseudonymous rants on message boards and blogs, Rubin devotes one chapter, shorter than the others, to “Hating the Faire.” She catalogs all the usual gripes about Ren faires, pointing out that accusations of nerdish celibacy exist alongside the contrary complaint that faires are over-sexualized. But are there no valid criticisms of Ren-faire culture beyond the ones Rubin handily swats down? Are the only disillusioned folk the wistful souls who wish the faire were as spontaneous and uncommercial as it was in the ’60s? Are there credible witnesses to the dark side of faire life? What does it mean that so many faire-goers told Rubin they’re “working class,” and can we trust their self-reporting? Rubin sometimes seems so charmed by Ren-faire subculture that it delights the cold spirit of scholarly inquiry right out of her.

Of course, I’m in danger of faulting Rubin for the book she didn’t write, when she’s clear about the purpose for the one she did. Perceptive and engaging, Well Met proves something the rest of us shouldn’t have missed: that the Ren faire isn’t an isolated cultural strand but a subculture that’s more interwoven with the rest of American life than even many faire-goers appreciate.

Well Met also answers, mirabile visu, a question that’s long nagged me: Why the heck aren’t they called “medieval faires”? According to Rubin, co-founder Phyllis Patterson did pitch the first faire to Pacifica Radio as a medieval-style open-air festival, but “[a] lawyer on KPFK’s board reportedly objected on the grounds that human rights in medieval Europe were so few, so Patterson swiftly suggested calling it a ‘Renaissance Faire.'” I appreciate Rubin digging this nugget out of a book of historic photos; even if Well Met doesn’t answer all of my questions, it does answer several I hadn’t known to ask—a rare feat for a cultural-studies book from an academic press, and well worth a hearty huzzah.

“We’re just fol-low-ing ancient his-to-ry…”

Every so often, I stumble onto some relic of American medievalism that seems charming but inconsequential—until a bit of digging brings out something more.

Behold: “I dreamed I was a medieval maiden in my Maidenform bra,” an ad that ran in magazines in 1959 and 1960. (Click here to see it larger.) The ad is based on the late-15th-century “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries designed in Paris, woven in Flanders, and now on display at the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Cluny. Five of the tapestries are devoted to the senses; a sixth tapestry has been variously interpreted.

Maidenform’s “I Dreamed…” campaign, which began in 1949 and ran for 20 years, was apparently so successful that it’s still studied in business schools. The other ads weren’t medievally themed, but they all showed a shirtless woman in some professional or historical setting. The “medieval maiden” ad stands out, though, for its fidelity to its source.

Place the ad and the tapestry side by side and you can see how little got removed (other than the maiden’s blouse).

The heraldic symbols on the banner (and on the unicorn’s little Thundershirt-shield) are intact, even though they’re meaningless now. The grimacing lion is gone; modern people might have have been distracted by him or found him comical. The woman no longer holds the unicorn’s horn but caresses it near its mouth. She’s also been decked out in a hat on loan, I would guess, from the neighborhood gnome.

Maidenform was determined to portray not just some fantasy scene, but a real and very specific medieval work. Why?

For one thing, the decade leading up to this ad was florid with chivalry, at least at the movies: Rogues of Sherwood Forest, Ivanhoe, Richard and the Crusaders, Knights of the Round Table, Prince Valiant, Lady Godiva, The Court Jester, Saint Joan, The Vikings, and at least two TV versions of A Connecticut Yankee. (With The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring, Ingmar Bergman cast a pall over these Technicolor revels, but he was an anomaly.) It’s no wonder that a couple years later, the press was quick to cast John F. Kennedy’s candidacy and presidency in terms of fair ladies and storybook heroes—even if there’d be no “Camelot” talk until after his assassination.

But maybe the Maidenform maiden is more of a high-culture dream. At the end of the 1950s, tapestries were big news: A decade earlier, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had hosted a show about French tapestries from 1375 to the present, and in 1958 and 1959 the Cloisters made two major tapestry acquisitions. In 1959, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired several tapestries about the exploits of Constantine, while the Brooklyn Museum showed off Norwegian tapestries from the 16th through 18th centuries.

(…and curiously, the New York Times reported in May 1958 that sculptor Elbert Weinberg had installed a terra-cotta lady-and-unicorn in the lobby of 405 Park Avenue.)

In 1959, American medievalism was enjoying a sort of historicist autumn. Renaissance fairs were a few years off and Tolkienesque fantasy had yet to go mainstream, so when people thought of the Middle Ages, they imagined the tidy past they enjoyed in movies—and, apparently, in magazine ads. It took me only a few minutes to find several advertisements from 1958 to 1960 that make the Middle Ages look as pleasant as it did in the movies of the time.

Plymouth Gin evoked jousting to invite Americans to join an international band of drinkers, pharma giant Parke-Davis paid tribute to hospitals in 12th-century France, Chivas Regal reveled in Scottish heritage, and the Grant Pulley and Hardware Corporation, makers of sliding doors, assumed you would know what a “portcullis” was. The medieval people in these ads—knights, nurses, architects—set precedents, and served as examples.

When Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram considered American medievalism in the 1970s, he saw more than folly. “What might sometimes appear to a European as slightly comical is nevertheless an expression of astonishing vitality,” he wrote. “And what many a dry pedant might dismiss as low-brow is in reality a kind of learning experience on a level different from that to which most Europeans are accustomed.” Interweaving high and not-so-high culture, the Maidenform ad shows the mass appeal of America’s medieval dream, even if nobody’s heeding the small print: “The past was never quite this perfect!”

“Not under the thumb of the cynical few…”

“In fact, the great champions of liberty against oppression, if their own words are to be trusted, have fought for the maintenance of liberties inherited from the Middle Ages. In our own day such traditional conceptions of liberty appear less seldom perhaps, for many liberals, and certainly most extreme radicals, are now frequently struggling for rights for which the Middle Ages can furnish few precedents. But this should not blind us to the all-important fact that for a long period in this historic struggle, indeed for the whole of the early part of it, it was for their medieval inheritance that all opponents of oppression engaged.”

—C.J. McIlwain, “Medieval Institutions in the Modern World,” Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, April 26, 1941, Princeton, N.J.