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Notes -
How accurate should historical fiction be?
What do we owe to history?
I just finished Aquitania by Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (what a mouthful), a “historical fiction” novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first marriage to Louis of France. This book was one of the nine I brought back from Spain; I picked it up because I had really enjoyed the Kraken police thriller novels that made Garcia Sáenz de Urturi famous, and generally enjoy historical fiction as a genre, although I am not sure this will continue to be the case based on the way the genre is heading. Unfortunately, I didn't like the book very much: the plot was all over the place because the author tried to insert an unconvincing thriller element into what was otherwise a period piece, the characters were at best two-dimensional, and the writing tried far too hard to be poetic. What really riled me up however was the absolute lack of concern that this book had for historicity. García Sáenz de Urturi took every salacious rumor that surrounded Eleanor of Aquitaine, ramped them up to 11, and then added in her own fabrications for good measure. Below are some of the more egregious events that I believe to be non-historical.
Eleanor was raped by the brothers of Louis the Fat when she was 8!!! after her older brother died while her father was still alive to attempt to claim Aquitaine for the Kings of France.
Eleanor was lovers with her uncle Raymond from the ages of 10-13 before she married Louis the Pious at 13. When she saw her uncle again on the 2nd crusade once she was actually married to Louis she refuses to have sex with him. Historically, the rumors of a tryst between Eleanor and Raymond only surround her visit to Antioch during the Second Crusade. I think these rumors are pretty unlikely in any case.
Eleanor is the director of a secret spy network called the Aquitanian cats that she uses to investigate the death of her father and undermine the Capets. She also a secret handbook filled with #inspirationalquotes from her ancestors.
The Abott Suger is actually Eleanor's uncle because Eleanor's grandfather had a secret brothel where he fucked nuns and Suger was the son of one of these nuns. Suger is also responsible for Eleanor's father's death because he has him murdered after he tries to kill the nuns rescued from this brothel to hush up the whole thing.
Eleanor is actually a secret pagan and so doesn't give a shit about the church or God because the Catholic Church is #corrupt and #political.
Aquitania is not unique in this sensationalism. Almost every historical fiction book I've read in the last five years plays at least this fast and loose with history and with historical figures. In Santiago Posteguillo's immensely popular Saga of Julius Caesar, Caesar is portrayed as a paragon of virtue who protects the poor and also is god's gift to women in bed, while his enemies, namely Sulla, are portrayed as twist sex-fiends who get off to young boys getting whipped and just want to oppress people for fun. Posteguillo's even more famous Africanus trilogy is just as bad, with Scipio subbed in for Caesar, and Fabius Maximus for Sulla. Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, while fairly historically accurate, completely fails to capture the medieval mindset. Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept tries so hard to be historical, but ends up making the Empress Maud and Stephen to be caricatures of themselves.
But @thejdizzler, why do you even care about all this ? These people died thousands of years ago, and we have sparse, if any, historical documentation of any of these people. The political and social conflicts of the roman world, and certainly the medieval world have little to do with the conflicts we have today. Let the people have their fun!
I disagree with this attitude for three reasons. Firstly, I think the truth is important in of itself. Lying about long dead people is a short step to lying about more recently dead people which is a short step to lying about people who are still living. Of course the amount of missing information increases substantially as we go back in time, but in the novels I've cited above, the portrayal of characters and events goes knowingly against the historical record. Where there is a gap, such as in the adolescence of Julius Caesar, or Eleanor's childhood, what we do know about character and era can be used to attempt a faith reconstruction, rather than a juvenile telenovela.
Secondly, a biased reading of history leads people to make specious comparisons to the present day. Posteguillo is guilty of this. During the tour for his first Julius Caesar book, he compared the struggle between Sulla and Caesar to the Russia-Ukraine War, with Putin being a stand-in for Sulla. Dude, do you really want to make that comparison? Pretty sure Putin doesn't have a sex dungeon in the Kremlin, and last I looked Zelensky wasn't committing genocide against the Celts. This is present a bit in Aquitania too, where Eleanor feels like her Occitan language is being oppressed and dominated by the French. Not only was Eleanor probably raised to speak French before Occitan, but repression of minority languages didn't really begin in France until the age of Napoleon. Nationalism wasn't really a thing until the 19th century.
Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.
Perhaps this is an unfairly high-bar to clear for authors, but I don't think so. No one is forcing you to write historical fiction, and if you don't want to do the research for a book to at least pass the sniff test of this amateur historian, you should just stick to fantasy.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect much accuracy from historical fiction unless the author explicitly states (e. g., in the introduction) that he has made an effort in that direction. Do you expect the escapades described in The Three Musketeers and its sequels (historical fiction written in the 1800s about the 1600s) to be accurate?
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I'm broadly aligned with you in this regard. Bad history in historical fiction is a pet peeve of mine. I've always felt that the truth of history is more interesting than the shallow preconceptions we have of it. Writers tend to write what they know, and the result tends to be derivative. Actual history is fresh and exciting precisely because it's so rarely portrayed.
That being said, holding others to an unrealistically high standard isn't going to help you. No one who would write a black Boleyn was ever going to write an honest work of historical fiction, so complaining about what she did write is just a waste of your mental energy.
If you want accurate historical fiction you'll have to write it yourself. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I think I'm just going to stop reading historical fiction, except from authors I know are good (Bernard Cornwell).
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History become a lot less useful and evocative when it became about archaeology, primary sources, and nationalism. Herodotus, Plutarch, and the writers of the bible would weep at the astonishingly bad culture-mythos the modern day brings. Take WW2, for instance. Let's look into a history book where we kept the old way of historizing intact.
History: messy, complicated, no clear narrative.
Mythology: clean-cut, simple, evocative narrative.
Ahistorical insertions of contemporary themes is nothing new: the only difference is that the current writers are so inept at it that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. Imposing the liberal mythology onto historical events is threadbare and spiritually hollow and mostly amounts to the authoress self-inserting herself as a girlboss princess.
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Guys, just read Laurus.
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I suspect you will greatly enjoy Laurent Binet’s commentary about the historicity issues in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.
Not really. It is tedious word salad saying absolutely nothing. Only concrete criticisms of the book are:
1/unreliable narrator (SS veteran recollecting his memories in advanced age) misremembered a historical date.
2/the same narrator does not clearly remembers after 40+ years what exact car was his boss using.
3/the protagonist is nihilist opportunist, not true devotee to noble ethos of National Socialism. How problematic, Führer and Reichsführer would not be amused.
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I can't bring myself to care about this when humans have been writing wildly inaccurate and politically motivated historical fiction since at least the Epic of Gilgamesh (and almost certainly much much earlier)
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I'll chime in to say that one of my favorite series of novels, Masters of Rome by McCollough, does a far more faithful rendition of Sulla. I remember consulting Wikipedia and LLMs about the veracity of several of the claims made about him, and was pleasantly surprised. Sure, several aspects, such as his rumored affair with his step-mother or the murder of his wives for gain, or potential affection for younger boys, might be slander by his political successors, but he was generally portrayed as an understandably flawed human, only larger than life in the way that people who make their marks on posterity tend to be.
Caesar? I suspect it's more of a mixed bag, and I haven't looked into it that much. McCullough presents him as a prodigy from birth, charming but principled, a favorite with the ladies, but that doesn't strike me as being a poor description of Caesar. Once again, just look at his more well-documented deeds.
Even if McCullough might lean to a more flamboyant interpretation of their lives, she's highly respected for her scholarship. You can tell that the lady Thought of Rome more often than all but the most ardent Romaboos today, counting myself in their numbers. She almost never makes anything up from whole cloth, and substitutes period-accurate guesses for aspects of daily life with verisimilitude. Further, I think that for historical characters as distant as Caesar and Sulla, any novel that isn't just a history textbook must take liberties with the truth, or at the very least, choose which historical interpretation to assume. There are tiers to this, and sliding scales for historical fidelity. I don't consider her behavior to be ahistorical at all, and historical fiction does have more leeway than an actual history.
I heartily endorse all the books, the first two are absolutely up there with the best fiction I've read.
Edit:
Given the discussion below on how truly historical depictions wouldn't be tolerable for modern audiences, I think the novel is an existence proof to the contrary. The Romans were simultaneously extremely modern in their sensibilities (we did try and intentionally resurrect quite a bit of their culture, every wonder why it's called a Senate?), but they were also alien. The book doesn't shy away from showing absolute brutality taken for granted by the people of the time, nor does it lie about their attitudes to physics and metaphysics being very far from our own. But the peoples of the past are still human, many of their prides, joys, sorrows and ambitions are recognizable to us today. And the novels do a better job at selling that than anything else I can name.
I've heard good things about McCullough from people who criticize Posteguillo, so I'll have to check him out.
I have no issue with Caesar being portrayed as charming or a prodigy: he likely was. What Posteguillo does that grinds my gears is sweep every flaw that Caesar had as a human being (probably in context the wife-fucking and huge ego, but I also consider the treatment of the Gauls to be pretty terrible, if not too far outside the norm for the time) under the rug so he can be a "perfect" hero.
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I was just rewatching (and complaining) about Wolf Hall Season 2 because of its addition of black guards and a black sister for Jane Seymour. It led me into a search for Tudor fiction where I learned the deep hatred of Philippa Gregory by Tudor history fans (apparently the Woodvilles really were witches, go figure).
But it was also pointed out that that's a feature not a bug. We know the story of the Prince in the Tower. It's just depressingly mundane, which is why we want it to be anything else besides the obvious. We know how it ended for Anne Boleyn. If Gregory wants to tell a story where these women gained agency by being witches or femme fatales is it the worst thing in the world?
Ah, but what if I, median viewer, don't want the real story (nor do I want to be told a story in a different timeline). "Richard did it" is boring and is the first thing anyone thinks of. I want something new and interesting that could be what happened!
If you're into straight history it can hardly be more accessible (especially European history obviously). Sometimes we don't want history though, it's often disappointing. We want a story about it.
It's hard to know how much to blame writers when they expect that you can just find the real story on your own time. In practice, yes, fiction often informs our views but at what point are the public to blame for that? Hillary Mantel is clearly reacting to a certain view of Cromwell and More. But she's clear that she's writing historical fiction.
That's kind of where I'm at with it. It's hard to come up with a line on historical realism because we will not reward writers for being historically accurate. The public may even laugh and dismiss you for violating their assumptions about what the world was like in the past.
But I draw the line at black Tudors. The difference there being that it's a clear top down imposition from the BBC not done to serve some story-telling purpose.
Wait, what? The famously fair-skinned Jane Seymour? As described by the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys:
And here was me thinking the black Anne Boleyn was going too far! Unless we're going to blame one or other of her parents for not keeping it in the marriage bed, how on earth does that work?
EDIT: Though, looking it up, that actress is playing Jane's sister-in-law rather than sister. Whew! The good repute of the Seymour parents is saved!
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The past is foreign country, and it is third world shithole country somewhere between Somalia and Zimbabwe. Not only the omnipresent hunger, disease, poverty and squalor, but values dissonance.
Accurate description of 100+ years old world would squick average modern reader after few pages. If you want full immersion into past, read unabridged and unexpurged works written at the time for contemporary readers.
A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad. Blackface is common and wholesome entertainment, suffragettes are treated as obviously insufferable shrews who only think the things they do because they're too bitchy for any man to want to marry, and indians are viewed as something between horrible savages and pest animals.
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Borgia vs The Borgias
...
(The article then goes on to suggest "historicity" vs "historical accuracy": aka just pick your battles and try to maintain a history-like vibe)
It's pretty funny that the most pilloried Word of God from JK Rowling (well, maybe barring the declaration that Dumbledore is gay) is probably a result of her knowing the above fact about Versailles and just adding it to her world.
If the audience doesn't reward you for this and it actively harms their SOD, why do it?
Pink was for boys and blue was for girls as recently as the victorians.
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I am reminded of fanfiction. You can write an alternate universe where things happen that didn't happen in the source material. You can also make a mistake and write fanon--things that people think are true about the work, but really aren't.
Every so often someone writes a common piece of fanon, gets called on it, and claims that that's okay because they are writing an alternate universe. Or even admits the fanon and says "well, I choose to make an alternate universe where this fanon is true".
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I reckon that most people having rotten/missing teeth was mostly a 19th Century and 20th Century phenomenon, driven by the new availability of cheap sugar. Medieval people consumed little to no sugar, so their teeth were generally healthy.
Little sugar but much bread, and likely the bread was filled with substantial grit from threshing and milling.
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They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.
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Yes, interesting little factoid (if it is a fact) I learned recently: Elizabeth I had bad teeth precisely because sugar was now the luxury, available, new, sweetening and cooking ingredient. Of course cooks went mad showing off what they could do with sugar, and of course everyone who could afford it loved to use it.
I get the point about clown pants, but going to the other extreme and having all your characters in black (fake) leather is equally bad. And that just exacerbates the problem, because if every show and movie has "communicating with the audience, dress them according to our values and tastes" costuming, that shapes the expectations of viewers, so you'll never get "in fact, bright colours and dyes meant high status" correct costumes.
There was this romantic potboiler/disaster movie from 2014 called Pompeii. Overall deeply mediocre. But one small detail that I really liked was that they made the soldiers uniforms a half-step between accurate Roman armor and modern black tactical body armor that you would see a SWAT team or special forces wearing. Not particularly period appropriate but it made the solders unusually imposing for a period piece, because your brain is subconsciously reading them like a modern military unit.
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In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.
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Yes, it's a coordination problem.
But the issue is that there's no benefit to solving said problem. Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?
Especially since the misconception may last precisely because it is of no great importance to anyone. People can find counterarguments to all sorts of sacred truths today...when they care.
Because that leads to Christopher Nolan dressing Bronze Age Greeks like they're the Batman.
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Having read the book, I do kind of get what you mean, but I'm not sure whether it's just the plain, modern language that the book is written in. Could you elaborate?
I think a big part of it for me was also the writing style but in addition to that I had two main other problems. There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters. This also an issue in the The Cathedral of the Sea, which uses the quasi-mythical practice of the first night to show us how evil European nobility was.
Then the stonemason also has a very modern attitude towards his work on the Cathedral. Not a whole lot of doing it for the glory of God, which probably the main motivation for the average peasant. He seemed to have a very careerist attitude towards the whole thing (like building cathedrals was his passion) which I found odd.
Then there's also the unhistorical widespread literacy, lack of cultural conflict between England and Wales, and the lack of language barriers between the nobility and peasants (remember this was set less than 100 years after the Norman conquest of England)/
I think it might reflect somewhat on the author as well. One of the reasons I stopped reading his books was all the weird sex-related stuff. I'm a bit prudish though.
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