Key findings of the Handbook
One of the key findings of The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies is that the study of reenactment has undergone a decisive shift. Whereas a decade ago, the nascent field was most closely allied with public history and museology, the intervening period has seen a shift away from history.
As indicated before, the number of historians—public or otherwise—working on reenactment is comparatively few. History educationalists in Europe remain interested in reenactment, yet, since history education remains a marginal field in many countries, academic historians' interest in reenactment remains correspondingly small because of the challenges posed by interdisciplinarity, among other factors. While history may have lost ground, what has gained in significance is performance studies. The work of Schneider, Arns, Luttiken, and others, has built—wittingly or not—on the insights of scholars like Dening, who recognized early and played upon the theatricality of historical knowledge making and who explicitly linked such performativity to social and political concerns.Many contributors to the Handbook embrace reenactment's shift toward performance studies, with its emphasis on the body as an evidentiary vehicle for historical knowledge making. Yet others flag intellectual concerns. These concerns center on questions about reenactment studies' loose handling of phenomena such as historical truth, evidence, and objectivity. Schwarz, for example, draws on the work ofJoan W Scott and Raymond Williams to question the supposed authenticity of experience. As Scott pointed out in the 1990s, the “appeal to experience as incontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation” is problematic because it leaves out “the constructed nature of experience, [and an awareness of] how subjects are constituted” (1991, p. 777). Schwarz links this explicitly to reenactment, which, she says, exhibits an
epistemological dependence on experience...
[that] runs the danger of hindering a better understanding of historical events and life worlds. One of these dangers is the result of a circular logic according to which the reenactor’s experience of the reconstructed historical setting can never do more than validate already accepted, regimented, and institutionally sanctioned assumptions about the historical past.A similar point is made by Haines, who identifies problems with reenactment studies’ current dependence on body-based evidence. “Historians,” she says, “have typically relied on a communal approach to establishing truth claims through peer review and accountability. Where one’s own body is being used as a source of evidence is this still possible?” she asks. A more sanguine view is taken by Magelssen, who highlights the ways in which reenactment establishes an affective “connection” between the past and the reenactor’s own life. Participatory programing at museums and heritage sites, he says, lends visitors “the perception of free choice that will help determine the outcome of the story.” But he sees something salutary in reenactment’s capacity for fostering emotional impact, inclusivity, and social justice.
Contributors to the volume collectively make clear that to become an autonomous field, reenactment studies will need to tend to its own disciplinary history. Although in its infancy, reenactment studies’ disciplinary origins in battle reconstructions and pageantry are becoming obscured as interests shift away from national memory culture and the long duree, and toward the direction of the recent past and its individualized, experiential manifestations. There is, moreover, a tendency for each academic field engaging with reenactment to reinvent the wheel. A prime example here is musicology, which grappled with questions of historical fidelity and authenticity before many other disciplines. The fierce debates over early music revival (also known as historically informed performance) in the 1990s were resolved, as Bowan points out, by an acknowledgment that musical reenactment was shaped by the concerns, tastes, and social and political agendas of the present, not the past.
At the same time, musicologists came to appreciate that musical reenactment could expand the aesthetic palette: performing on period musical instruments and reintroducing historical listening practices contributed to unfamiliar soundscapes that audiences found rich and rewarding. Musical reenactment was thus both chastened and elevated in its claims to represent and interpret past musical cultures. Unlike other branches of reenactment, which remain mired in the problem of authenticity and are wedded to what we might call “stitch Nazism,” historically informed music performance was discovered to have value in and of itself, independent of any assertions of historical authenticity. Recently, the interest in musical reenactment has taken a new direction, as musicologists come to investigate its potential for commemoration.