In a cheerfully cluttered home studio on Vancouver's East Side, artist Sharon Burrows is busy re-creating the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. Burrows, a retired Jungian-oriented therapist, creates authentic hand-bound parchment books, illuminated scrolls, Byzantine-style icon paintings and delicate embroidery.

The dazzling art works reflect Burrows' enchantment with the past and what its arts and crafts have to tell us about past eras and the human condition.

Reflecting a lifelong interest in feminism, women's history and spirituality, Burrows has focused much of her art work on the figure of Saint Mary Magdalene.

The first illuminated manuscript book she hand-crafted, in 1997, was about the life of the saint. The leather bound text is graced by a loving copy of an icon-style portrait Burrows first saw years ago in Florence. The original is by the 13th-century Italian artist known as the Master of the Magdalene. The book features other illustrations done in a similar visual style and a text, the Legend of Mary, done in classic medieval calligraphy.

Burrows is a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. The SCA promotes a wide range of historical re-creation activities that include non-lethal jousts and combats, ceremonies and feasts, as well as the kind of painstaking artistic creations that ornament Burrows's studio.

Within the SCA, Burrows, who like many members of the organization has adopted a medieval name and persona, uses the name Aelana Cordovera. She describes her persona as "...a guild hall or abbess figure" from medieval Europe.

The Courier recently visited Burrows at her Cape Cod blue Victorian home a few blocks east of Main. Upstairs, the artist's living room is given over to her work, with icons and a wide array of books crowding together on floor-to-ceiling shelves, the ingredients for handmade paints arrayed on a counter, embroidery and parchment pages from a book-making project spread out on her work table. The icons are visually rich, with gold leaf and intense jewel-like colours illuminating the stylized figures. Some of Burrows's icons are traditional saints such as Saint Nicholas, while others are memorial portraits of recently deceased local members of the SCA.

Born on the North Shore, Burrows has lived all her life in the Vancouver area, where she has been a working class housewife, a single mother on welfare, a student, a social worker and a therapist. Over the years she has accumulated an impressive array of academic qualifications, including a master's degree in humanistic psychology, a doctorate in health and human services and a bachelor of fine arts from Emily Carr. (Full disclosure: I knew Burrows in the world of therapy, counselling and communications workshops in the 1970s and '80s.) "My ultimate goal in all my work is to create a shrine of art work focusing on the feminine. The SCA is by policy secular, but I have always been intrigued by para-religious art. One of my first projects was a medieval-style manuscript about Mary Magdalene--something I took up long before the DaVinci Code fad," she says with a rueful laugh.

Burrows explains the technical side of recreating medieval art on parchment and wood panels. First, you need parchment, ideally the expensive calf-leather vellum treasured by the monks who did most of the bookmaking in medieval Europe, but more often in her case the cheaper goatskin. To create parchment, leather is soaked in a lye solution, then scraped and stretched on a frame.

Once the artist has the prepared parchment in hand, she cuts it to double the intended page size of her planned book and presses the pages between boards to prevent curling.

Then she's ready to sketch in the outline of her intended illustrations in pencil or silver point. The pictures are either copies of existing medieval art or original designs done in medieval style. Working on a light table, a convenience she laughingly admits wasn't available to the scribes whose work she's emulating, Burrows then inks over the penciled outlines. Once this painstaking process is complete, she's ready to create the illustrations on parchment.

The first colour to be applied when Burrows is illustrating one of her handmade books is gold leaf, which she cuts to pattern and glues onto the parchment, using a medieval adhesive called gum ammoniac.

After gluing down the gold leaf, she paints all the pages she's preparing that day one colour at a time.

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Burrows uses paints based on recipes from the Middle Ages, usually with a base of egg yolk or egg white. For work on parchment, she prepares a liquid known as "glair" by whipping egg white into a meringue and then draining off the clear liquid that remains beneath the meringue. The glair is mixed with pigment, often a ground mineral like lapis lazuli or carbon black. The day I visit, Burrows creates a green blue pigment, known as Chrysacola, by grinding azurite and malachite with a mortar and pestle and adding the powder thus created to glair. Other pigments used include red and yellow ochres, green earth, raw and burnt Sienna, raw and burnt umbers, as well as a tree resin known as dragon's blood.

Once the illustrations and text are completed, Burrows uses a wooden sewing frame on which she mounts the pages, folded into bundles known as quires, together with the cover boards. She stitches the quires together, anchoring each section to leather straps attached to the frame.

Burrows is currently developing another book, a life of the East Anglian warrior saint, King Edmund. The Life and Miracles of St. Edmund features hand-painted pictures on parchment (28 pages of illustrations are completed) and a text of about 15 pages is in the planning stage.

The text will include a translation of the life of St. Edmund written in 985 AD by Abbo of Fleury and a letter from Pope Gregory defending the use of pictures in the religious education of the illiterate. Abbo's biographical text, written about 100 years after St. Edmund's death, details the king's battles against invading Vikings and the miracles that allegedly attended his life and death. "This is a real action movie book," Burrows says, "complete with battles and miracles."

To prepare paints for her icons, which are done on wooden panels, Burrows executes a similar procedure to the one for painting on parchment, substituting egg yolk for the egg white glair and using water to dilute the yolk and pigment mixture. She prepares the panels for paint with coats of gesso made from rabbit-skin glue and chalk, and once the icon is complete she adds a final coat of varnish to seal the work. Some of her icons are partially sheathed in elaborately worked tin covers of repoussé work, a three-dimensional form created by using wooden tools to press a pattern into the back of the tin sheet on a soft leather pad, then reversing and mounting it on the painting so the raised pattern faces out at the icon's viewer.

Burrows's art work, which has been displayed at local churches and galleries, plays to rave reviews from a local academic, fellow artists and other activists within the SCA. Lissa Duncan, whose name within the confines of the SCA is Mistress Sieglynda, was a crucial figure in Burrows's development as an artist, encouraging her interests and urging her to attend Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

"What's interesting about Sharon's work is that she can take a modern thread and work it into a fabric that has a different cultural context," Duncan says. "People cherish her works... Sharon's a powerhouse. She creates prodigious amounts of work. She has so much heart."

Dr. Carol Knicely, who teaches medieval art history at UBC, says of Burrows, once one of her students, that "...the quality of her work is superb... I always appreciated how much she knew about medieval artistic technique."

The SCA leader who is, within the feudal relations that characterize the group's structure, Sharon Burrows's lord and mentor, Baron Master Steffano de Gucci (Vancouver graphic artist Steve Gray in non-SCA circles) says that Burrows is a groundbreaking figure in the society.

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"Painting is in its infancy in the SCA," he tells the Courier. "Often the main presence of the visual is in period costuming for our events, but Sharon has been a pioneer, especially in the icons she has been painting of SCA members who have died."

Kathleen Symons, who has shown Burrows's work at her Main Artery Gallery in Vancouver, praises her as an artist and teacher. She says Burrows, who has taught illumination classes at the Main Artery, is a "kind, generous and skilled instructor."

Burrows, who sees the educational impact of her recreation of medieval arts as one of her prime goals, teaches aspiring artists not only through Symons's gallery, but also through the University of Ithra, a medieval school recreated within the SCA. She's currently leading a year-long course in bookbinding and has a waiting list of candidates for next year.

It isn't possible to spend time in Burrows's company without wanting to know more about the Society for Creative Anachronism. Is the SCA a sweetly eccentric community of history buffs, a serious band of historical researchers, a real life combination of games such as Dungeons and Dragons with social networking sites such as Facebook or a combination of all three?

Burrows joined because of her daughter Joanne, who'd been a member of the society since she was 15.

"At first I tagged along sort of as a medieval soccer mom, but I got more and more interested, and once I met Lissa Duncan, who encouraged and mentored me as an artist, I was playing for real. The SCA is so rich and various. It includes artists, party people, folks interested in fencing and jousting and folks interested in absolute authenticity. Being in the SCA gave me an alternative to my therapist persona."

Dr. Michael A. Cramer, an actor, director, filmmaker and scholar, who teaches communications and theatre at the City University of New York, also provides insight. Cramer is the author of Medieval Fantasy as Performance: The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages, and himself a member of the SCA since 1979. "The SCA is a community," he says, "and like any community it has some problems, but it meets many needs that used to be filled by churches. It promotes an ethical code, but within a carnivalesque space and it provides opportunities for social networking."

Cramer says that the SCA can usefully be viewed as a form of participatory art, like the happenings and performance art of the '60s, '70s and '80s. Unlike the somewhat similar phenomenon of Renaissance Fairs, Cramer says, SCA events involve everyone present directly in the performance. "In the SCA, there is no audience," he explains.

The crux of his book and view of the SCA, the scholar says, is that the organization represents a renewal of a medieval tradition called the King Game. The Game, a feature of the carnivals that relieved the rigours of medieval life, saw a "mock king" chosen for the duration of the carnival, often by physical contest. Some scholars, Cramer says, link the King Game to Druid harvest king traditions, and to the Fisher King and the Green Man, recurrent figures in medieval art and culture. "The role of the visual arts in the SCA," he says, "can best be viewed as a rediscovery of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its interest in pre-industrial art forms and community building."

The SCA, he explains, was founded in California in 1966 by a group of graduate students inspired by Sir Walter Scott's highly idealized novels about the Middle Ages. The founding party featured a contest to see who would name the Queen of Love and Beauty and a march down Berkeley streets to "protest the 20th century." The group continued to hold mock-medieval tournaments and parties, and a year later, the winner was proclaimed King for the first time. The motif of contests to choose a King has remained a strong one in the SCA.

Many SCA members form their strongest social bonds within the organization, Cramer says. This point was echoed by local SCA members, including the head of Burrows's SCA household, Baron Steffano.

"The SCA is a different social culture," he says. "One of the key assumptions is that every woman is beautiful and every gentleman is handsome, and there are styles of medieval dress that are flattering to every body type. Being in costume is a great equalizer. No one knows your credit rating or what you do. You can reinvent yourself."

Costume designer and 20-year-SCA veteran Naomi Lazarus calls her group "a nice little subculture, where people take care of each other."

"The kids learn service, volunteerism, chivalry and how to flirt," she laughs. "A 13-year-old boy who knows how to kiss a lady's hand is way out ahead of the other boys."

"The SCA events are like Dungeons and Dragons or online gaming," laughs Gray (a.k.a. Baron Steffano), "only you get to drink beer and kiss the girls."

tos@infinet.net