Czech Historical Reenactment of the Early Middle Ages: Initial Research Problems and Concepts

This article, one of the first to examine the situation in the Czech Republic, presents a group of reenactors of the early Middle Ages with an emphasis on high material and experiential authenticity. Oral history in its post-positivist paradigm was the dominating method to reveal their subjective experiences. The representations contained in the interviews are a source for modulated personal experience that express the role, perceived by the actors, inside the reenactment movement as well as for the formulation of their self-concept in history. The text focusses on three analytic schemes – the paradoxes of “authenticity” in current reconstructions of medieval combat, the circumstances of negotiating authenticity, and the concept of Reinhart Koselleck’s “multiple temporalities” that is used here to explain the experiential “mental travelling” of the reenactors between the present and the past.