#65 "Tale of Genji, Making Good Scents, Commedia Dell'Arte"

Becoming Serena: From Soccer Mom to Ren Faire Performer
Renaissance Magazine takes you behind the scenes as one plucky ren faire fan takes the plunge and auditions for the Michigan Renaissance Festival.

Making Good Scents: Fragrance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
If asked to imagine the smell of the medieval world, most people would probably crinkle their nose in disgust. We reveal that the well-kept medieval and renaissance citizen had a deep appreciation for beautiful fragrances, and took great pains to surround their homes and bodies with pleasing scents.

Tale of Genji: The Japanese Lancelot
Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and later England, had a profound influence on English and French literature. But we discover something incredible 150 years before Eleanor was holding court in France, the Japanese were producing an astonishingly similar literature.

Dance of Death
Meet Death himself as personified in late medieval European art, which reflected the period’s paroxysm of grisly death and warfare by personifying the Grim Reaper. A dance with Death could occur at any time whether you were prince or pauper, pope or peasant.

The Visit of the Gypsies
We take you to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire to see “The Visit of the Gypsies” an extraordinary early sixteenth-century tapestry that tells the tale of a meeting between a group of wealthy aristocrats and Gypsies (Roma) involved in a deer hunt.

Commedia Dell'Arte
Renaissance Magazine reveals the bawdy form of Italian street theatre popular during the 16th and 17th centuries, consisting of lively antics, physical comedy, stock characters, and farcical plots.

......and much, much more!