“That history may dance and sing and laugh and learn in glad company with now.”
Our Mission
To perpetuate interest in and involvement with the handcrafts, humanities, performing arts, and festivals of the past through the practice of Living History educational and performance techniques.
Our motto
"We trick into learning with a laugh..."
Our Background
The Centre was founded in the spring of 1968 by Ronald and Phyllis Patterson, creators of the Renaissance Faire concept in America. The Centre is chartered as a California not-for-profit educational and cultural foundation and just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary!
Since its founding, the Centre’s focus has been the English Renaissance and Victorian periods of Western culture, two great eras of adventure and achievement, not only in geographical explorations, but also in the arts, humanities, and physical sciences. We believe that heightened awareness and involvement in the life of these rich and creative periods of rapid change and reevaluation of life styles and values can give us a perspective on our time and its creative possibilities.
The Centre encourages the use of Living History educational techniques to better experience the “aliveness” of daily-life history in all cultures and historical time periods.