The golden age of al-Andalus [Ressource électronique] / Robert Raymond Gabriel Kearns

Master of Arts : Humanities : the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills : 2008

History is a moldy old dull text book. It is a class one must take to fulfill a credit, or a professor talking about a bunch of dead guys. In today's fast-paced industrial microburst- a-second society, where attention spans are measured in sound bites, history is a dead subject to most. This dreary subject is not the history that I know or study. For me history is alive; it is vibrant. It is my passion, not because I find it in a text book but because I find it on the field of "medieval combat." I find it in the livinghistory camps, where history is not just spoken about or read about in a two-dimensional text book or painting, but lived in full three-dimensional vivid techno color. I find it in the clash of the axe, hammer, spear or sword which I swing weekly during re-enactment exhibitions, which the medieval living history group "The Normans of the Southern Sun" participate in throughout the Southeast. I found it in the shows my wife and I did with the Normans of the Sun living history group while living in Italy. We toured all summer throughout southern Italy eating, drinking and performing to the roar of the crowd. To these crowds history was not dead, it was on the field, alive and living in my blade, or in my wife's kit. My many friends, my family and I may work in the 21st century, in highly technical professions, but on the weekends throughout the Southeast we live in the 11th century. Our clothes, food, and gear, right down to our cook pots, are from that era. Ladies and gentlemen, I say to you this is the history I live, this is the history for the last seven years I have lived, and it is this history that I bring to the people every weekend. It is this passion for living history that I have poured into these two-dimensional pages. I hope as you read it you will see and fill the third dimension which is just below the text.