The New Yorker: “The Book Bench: The Middle Ages Meet Suburbia” by Caroline Dworin
“Sometimes, in the wooded distance near my pretty little college on the Hudson, one would see near-grown males, battle-clad in capes and helmets, beating each other with swords. It is likely that such boys had chosen to attend my college because it held a reputation institutionally as a champion of the artistic, intellectual, and social long shot. For instance, the two students who dressed, for what seemed like weeks, in matching silver spacesuits, were not treated as pariahs; nor was the boy who was habitually clad in a chainmail tunic he’d crafted himself.
I thought little of these characters until I encountered “Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages,” a folio (with an all-important accompanying online video) of fifty-nine portraits of “reenactors,” by the photographer E. F. Kitchen, forthcoming from powerHouse Books.” [ Read the complete article on The New Yorker’s web site ]
