Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment

Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call ‘the near, the low, the common’. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson’s efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his ‘aversive thinking’: his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell’s Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell’s philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson’s engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.

Education and Heritage of Medieval Warfare. A Study on the Transmission of Knowledge by Informal Educators in Defensive Spaces

Historical reenactment is becoming a top-tier teaching tool in the countries of Southern Europe. In Spain specifically, this discipline is experiencing a boom as a heritage education method, particularly in informal settings. This article is the outcome of a qualitative research study of the results obtained from one hundred and fifteen educators from historical reenactment groups. The study analyses the methods used by the exponents of this discipline to teach war in the Middle Ages, specifically in three Spanish castles dating from the 11th to the 12th centuries. It has made it possible to analyse how the educational discourses are organised in relation to Medieval war within military spaces from this period, and how historical reenactment is a coadjutant in the construction of teaching/learning spaces from a heritage education perspective.

Playing the past: Historical video games as participatory public history in China

Historical video games, as one genre of historical reenactment in the digital environment, have rapidly evolved in China during the past two decades. Probing the affective, imaginative, and playful nature of historical video games, this article argues that the power of historical video games lies first in the methodological value and pedagogical virtue of the counterfactual thinking, and second in the potential to digitally and collectively shape the historical consciousness of players. With a potential for a shared authority, historical video games have emerged as participatory public history in China.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: REMEMBERING THE GREAT WAR BETWEEN TRUTH AND REENACTMENT

This paper analyses the phenomenon of historical reenactment of Great War battles as an effort to create what is termed ‘living history’. Thousands of people all over the world have participated in such reenactments, and their number increased significantly during the period surrounding the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. Through a comparison with representations of war in historical writing, in museums and in the performing arts, I examine the claim of reenactors that they can enter into historical experience. I criticise this claim, and show how distant it is from those who do not claim to relive history but (more modestly) to represent it. In their search for ‘living history’, reenactors make two major errors. They strip war of its political content, and they sanitise and trivialise combat.