A heritage trail bio-adaptation of Rebecca Paston’s Letters: Presence and process in conversation with Renaissance imitatio

This case study examines how Rebecca Paston’s life, hidden in archives for four centuries, was adapted for a heritage trail around the Paston manor lands in Oxnead, Norfolk (UK). Understanding adaptation as a process-driven interpretation that engages with form, ideology, and context has been examined in various media over the last two decades. This study builds on that trajectory by investigating a relatively underexplored form, heritage trail walking. The trail form offers opportunities and challenges in bio-adaptation, focusing on negotiating between past and present through movement: walking and talking are interdependent, embodied praxis. In this context, heritage trail storytelling does not present a static historical script of a life, but re-performs it through a living, co-performed process, unfolding in real-time encounters with body, text, and place. Rebecca Paston’s life offers a compelling subject within this framework, as it enables a nuanced conversation to emerge between modern adaptation critiques on fidelity, creativity, and intertextuality, and the historical particularities of adaptation during Rebecca’s time, notably the Renaissance practice of imitatio. This approach enables an in-depth analysis of how historical adaptation strategies inform and challenge contemporary theories of reinterpretation and cultural engagement, fostering an interplay between historical particularity and modern interpretive innovation.