This is the second season in a row I’ve skipped the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire because of Covid. While the Faire itself has continued, my history with respiratory illnesses makes me hesitant to stand in large crowds, even after my vaccine. Alas, perhaps next season my four humors shall be balanced well enough to resist this wicked miasma and I will return once again to the land of yore set betwixt the fields and farmsteads of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Perhaps.
The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire is a less than two-hour drive from my home in Philadelphia. Situated on site of the Mount Hope Estate, Lancaster County, the PA Ren Faire is just one of several events hosted there through the year.
The Faire site, aka “The Shire,” is a full immersion experience. Visitors enter through a vaguely medieval castle-style gate before wandering down winding roads that lead to shoppes, theatre stages, taverns, at least one pirate ship, and even a human chess board. There are magicians, acrobats, mermaids, the occasional unicorn, and so many performers ready to meet and greet you. You are but another character in their wild improvised plays.
There are knights on horseback, jousting with lances and dueling with broadswords. Chivalry and betrayal frame their same story every weekend, battling to the death, fighting for love and honor.
Overseeing all of it is the Queen, maintaining her regal façade while wearing more layers than would ever be advisable during the Pennsylvania Summer. She parades through the Shire with her full court in tow, beginning and ending each day by her decree.
The PA Ren Faire is definitely the style of Renaissance faire that revels in fantasy with a lesser consideration to accuracy (an age-old rivalry of historical reenactments vs. interactive entertainment). But the fantasy is what I love most about the Faire. I’m here to forget the real world of today, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be met with the real world of 15th or 16th century Europe. I want Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Last Unicorn. I want (if only for a day) the off-kilter adventure, weird and wonderful, far removed from “normal” and squarely within the realm of the fantastical.
Wouldn’t we all love to live out what’s in our imaginations?
If you are looking for this specific type of escapism but can’t wait for your local Renaissance Faire’s season to return, I present three books to help satisfy your yearning:
All’s Faire in Middle School by Victoria Jamieson
Middle grade, graphic novel
Imogene grew up in the world of the Renaissance Faire, the daughter of a shoppe keeper and a knight, faithful subjects to Elizabeth, Queen of Florida. Imogene is an aspiring squire who has been homeschooled her entire life. When her parents make the decision to send her to public school, it’s just in time for her to start middle school.
I’ve heard others comment that you cannot trust anyone who remembers their middle school years fondly. Poor Imogene has to learn the rules of school socialization during what are easily the worst years of childhood. It does not go well.
As she adjusts to the new and startling world of middle school, Imogene is still spending her weekends working at the faire alongside her family, as well as with her adopted extended family of the faire’s cast and crew. When she starts failing in the real world, she pins her hopes of thriving on the imaginary weekend realms she inhabits. Before long, her problems at school carry over into every aspect of her life and a series of poor decisions on her part makes everything more complicated and confusing. Surviving middle school will require Imogene to trust and accept that there are some things she cannot control in her life. It takes hard work and personal growth to go from squire to knight, both literally and figuratively.
This graphic novel doesn’t shy away from the difficulties many kids face, and Imogene’s choices can be frustrating to read. But her actions are so, so relatable to anyone who has or is currently struggling to simply survive in a world that feels designed to tear you down. All that said, it’s still a fun read, especially the scenes at the Renaissance Faire. What kid wouldn’t want to be a knight-in-training, even when everything else sucks? That’s some fantastic escapism.
Well Met by Jen Deluca
Romance, Adult fiction
I read this charming rom-com immediately after being furloughed from my job during the height of the pandemic. I needed exactly this book in exactly that moment.
There’s no re-invention of the romance genre in this novel, just a fun new setting, and that’s all right. Emily and Simon are our classic enemies-to-lovers coupling. She’s staying with her sister after her life falls apart, trying to find new purpose. He’s an English teacher with a stern attitude and a lingering sadness behind dark brown eyes. Pretty standard romance pairing, except that these two conduct their sexually frustrated warring on the grounds of an independent Renaissance Faire run by the charming townsfolk of the fictional Willow Creek, MD.
In this fantasy setting, they become a wench and pirate, precisely the sort of pairing that appeals to the faire’s tourists. Swept up in the illusion, their characters connect in ways their real selves can’t. The Renaissance Faire becomes a fairy tale, and a happily ever after could be theirs if only Emily and Simon would just stop arguing about Shakespeare.
And, for those who know what to expect from the genre, the scene where these two finally get together is a finely rendered chapter and half, and I’ll just leave it at that.
Well Met plays with every trope of the romance genre but still keeps things fun and light for most of the book. The humor is a bit cheesy, and the plot a tad predictable, but the romance is satisfying and well earned. Well Met is (I can tell you from experience) a perfect light read for when you’re feeling down or in need of a happy distraction.
Well Met: Renaissance Faires & The American Counterculture by Rachel Lee Rubin
Entertainment, American History, Social Science
Rubin’s thorough examination of the roots of the very American invention of the Renaissance Faire is structured like an extended dissertation that is also highly readable. Well Met is meticulously researched and full of interviews with the people who built the Renaissance Faire from humble acting troupes into a national phenomenon.
Rubin makes a compelling argument that without the counterculture movements of the 1950s and 1960s the faires would never have taken off, even if some of the early connections are only tangential. The early faires acquired numerous talented actors who had been blacklisted in Hollywood by McCarthyism. The natural and creative settings of the faires in the 1960s were an obvious magnet for the rising hippie culture. Their appeal only increased after conservative communities decided faire activities were threatening to their American ideals.
Ironically, this rebellious and independent spirit would inspire large entertainment enterprises to create conglomerates of commercial Renaissance Faires that operate across the country today. Rubin raises questions about how much of that early faire still lives in the various faires we all love today.
Other fascinating elements of Well Met include the role artisans and craftspeople played in developing modern faires, the argument about authenticity (and how this argument is as contentious today as it was fifty years ago), and how different definitions of community have developed within the social structures of the people who work at faires compared with the people who attend them.
Well Met is certainly academic in its approach to tell this history, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. Well Met should be required reading for anyone who has taken more than a passing interest in American Renaissance Faires.
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