The fair began four years ago as a joint project of students in Laura Harbers' social studies and Dawn Whitney's language arts classes. Not only do the seventh-graders involved have to assemble their own booths for the fair, but their in-class projects include writing a research paper and giving a speech on some aspect of Renaissance life. Students must also write a piece of historical fiction in the first-person voice, in which their character is living during that time period.

Harbers said putting on the fair helps pique her students' interest in the Renaissance period.

"Learning about it didn't mean anything until they started learning about it from a personal perspective," she added. "It was a time of such difference in social classes."

Students' booths offered a variety of activities undertaken by the different social classes of the time. Seventh-grader Amy Grace Robinson joined a band of gypsies for the day, becoming part of a "close-knit communal people." If she were an actual gypsy, Amy Grace said, she'd be married by now, since most of them tied the knot at age 12 or 13.

The students and parent volunteers who ran the booths enlightened visitors with bits of wisdom about how an activity fit into the daily life of a Renaissance man or woman. As students made wreaths, they learned that the fashion of the day was to tie blonde hair around the finished product. A visit to the apothecary revealed that marjoram was used to make poultices.

Other exhibits gave the adolescents a chance to blow off some steam. Chris Greene and Corey Shepherd, who oversaw the sword fighting and got in a few bouts of their own with the foam-rubber weapons, said it was "just for fun."

Of the 54 booths at the fair, 16 were devoted to cultures other than the Western European society typically associated with the Renaissance. Student Marcus Moreano, who was acting as a Mesoamerican bark painter, couldn't remember exactly what kind of bark the Aztecs usually used as a canvas, but he said it was similar to the sandpaper he was providing at his booth.

In spite of all the other activity, the line of seventh-graders headed to the altar remained constant. When the "Royal Shakespeare Company" was having trouble attracting an audience to the "Old Globe Theater" for its production of Othello, the director announced, "There will be no marriages for the next few minutes. Come see the Shakespeare play!"