ABSTRACT
Participants in popular TV-reenactment shows from the early 2000s frequently alluded to an immediate, corporeal experience of the past when asked to explain what had motivated their involvement. They described the sensation, sometimes labeled a period rush, in terms of a “complete absorption in the reenacted event” (Agnew, 2004, p. 330), one that let history come alive for them. Such claims might all-too-easily be disregarded as the naive delusions of self-fashioned living historians, and yet the argument here is primarily based on an analysis of the popular programs in which they took part. While not every reenactment relies on the participants’ identification with the historical personas that they embody to the same extent, the assertions made by these hobby reenactors get to the heart of reenactment’s epistemological project at large. Positioning itself in opposition to book learning and dusty historical scholarship, reenactment’s claim to knowledge rests on a different and allegedly more immediate access to the past being revisited. This access, reenactors maintain, is provided by means of the intense and supposedly unfiltered experiences of earlier times that result from immersion in an interactive historical environment. Based on their experiences, reenactors might claim to know what it would have been like to run a middle-class Victorian household, to take part in the class struggle on a Prussian country estate in 1900, or to live on a mid-19th-century Australian sheep station (1900 House; Abenteuer 1900; Outback House).
