The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. (SCA) is a non-profit educational organization devoted to study of dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts, skills, and traditions pre-17th-century. Most of its activities take place in the context of a social structure adapted from the forms of the European Middle Ages, which allows participants to take a first-hand look at various aspects of the life, culture and technology of the times under study. It is part of the “living history” movement, which means that members try to reproduce various aspects of the culture and technology of their period, as well as doing more traditional historical research.

The SCA sponsors events such as tournaments, feasts, and university sessions where folks dress according to medieval and Renaissance styles, and participate in activities based on the civil and martial skills of the period. Events have a number of focal areas, including combat (heavy armor/weapons, fencing, combat archery), costuming, armoring, archery, thrown weapons (axes, spears and knives), calligraphy, dancing, music, cookery, and board and field games, plus a variety of technical and social skills which help establish the ambiance of life at a period court. Society events are open to the public, but, in keeping with the emphasis on living history rather than dramatic performance, all attendees are expected to make an attempt to preserve the atmosphere and fit in with the SCA’s standards of dress and behavior. We also regularly hold less formal and more locally accessible practices and get-togethers, working on areas including fencing, heavy combat, dancing, calligraphy and illumination, archery, thrown weapons and more.

Our activities range very widely, including a much broader span of time and culture than most groups in the “living history” movement try to sample. The people we’ve chosen for models were fond of play-acting and pageantry; they would happily base tournaments and revels on ancient history and distant lands, so we can use themes from outside medieval and Renaissance Europe. They also reached remote parts of the world, despite the limits of their technology, and people born to other civilizations traveled too, so we can allow for individuals and information from almost anywhere. The task is to weave all this together, so that the events we sponsor are recognizably our own.

There are tens of thousands of active SCA participants, who administrate local chapters of the SCA in all fifty states, plus dozens of countries abroad. There are over 30,000 paid members of the corporation, and the total number of participants is around 60,000 people.