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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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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.

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.

If you want full immersion into past, read unabridged and unexpurged works written at the time for contemporary readers.

Sadly no. Those works assume that the readers already know all about the era, given that they live in it. They lack all the details required for an accurate picture.

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.

For thorough deconstruction and demolition of LHotP from 21st century perspective, see here.

TL;DR: These people are all very problematic, the yikes meter in red all the time, and, in addition, they are second handed scroungers, moochers and failures, losers all. No self made Randian hero in sight. Reasonable person would, after utter failure of third homesteading attempt, move to big city, get job in a factory and be much more prosperous and happier.

The reviewer knows well what xir is talking about, being highly problematic, and also highly successful person xirself.

A Chukcha applies for membership in the Union of Soviet Writers. He is asked what literature he is familiar with. “Have you read Pushkin?” “No.” “Have you read Dostoevsky?” “No.” “Can you read at all?” The Chukcha, offended, replies, “Chukcha not reader, Chukcha writer!”

edit: links linked properly

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.

I'll caveat that the books (and even official record) are flaky on Almanzo's age when he started courting Laura: the book where the romance actually happens claims that Almanzo was 20 and Laura was 15, while later books after Laura is older give a ten-year age gap. The reality's... messy, with Almanzo officially being ten years older, but enough people lied about their age for homesteading act purposes that some people suspect he was only eight years older.

While the original age gap would have only been a little on the larger side in its original timeframe, by the time Little House On the Prarie was published the author was well aware it wouldn't have been acceptable among her intended readership. So it's especially interesting as an example of how a story can be sanitized and that sanitized version in turn become.

(For another example a different direction: Catcher in the Rye features a scene where the main character hires a prostitute. The main character is sixteen. They don't actually have sex, so it's all good, right? Eh... the prostitute is, pointedly, the same age as Holden. Contemporaneously, there was more outrage for having a prostitute at all in that class of novel, than for having an underage one.)

Today twenty year olds are not allowed to date 15 year olds(17 year olds sûre, that happens).

Yeah, and it was already sketchy-adjacent by the 1930s. But it wasn't 'get the flamer, the heavy flamer' in the way that a 25-year-old going after a 15-year-old was even then.

Borgia vs The Borgias

In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand. The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles. Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

...

Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time. I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: “Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?” Which do you want, to communicate with the audience, or to be accurate? I choose A.

(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?

Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles

So far as I can tell, it was mostly propagandists later on who said that, or it was a metaphor.

I ran it through ChatGPT and /r/askhistorians for a source and apparently it isn't a pure invention. The rumors about a person peeing on themselves weren't about Marie Antoinette either (though the below book's assertion that it was cheerfully accepted is weird since the original source is unflattering). Tony Spaworth's book on it does mostly complain about the smell leaking from nearby latrines so maybe the regularity of that was conflated with people in the public galleries "pissing in all corners" as Princess Charlotte apparently complained being standard practice.

Sanitation, or lack of it, did something to level these differences in living conditions. Although French people of the time saw Louis XIV’s Versailles as a gold standard of refinement, older habits died hard. Versailles “cheerfully accepted” the princesse d’Harcourt, whose obnoxious behavior—she sometimes relieved herself in her skirts, nonchalantly leaving a foul trail behind her for the servants to clean up—was like a throwback to a less polite age, when aristocrats had bothered themselves less with self-restraint.

Even members of the royal family—women as well as men, the king included—thought nothing of giving audiences or chatting to intimates while installed on the closestool. In 1723 the high-living Regent received Saint-Simon in this way at Versailles the morning after one of his late-night suppers, horrifying his friend by his befuddled manner and thick voice. Within a month the Regent was dead.

The privies of Louis XIV’s Versailles have so far escaped close study. In the eighteenth century there were public latrines placed in the corridors and stairwells of the palace, the Grand Commons, and the other annexes: these latrines consisted of a room with a wooden seat, or lunette, closed by a cover in a vain attempt to shut in the odors, and connected by a waste pipe to a cesspit. Some were kept locked and the key distributed to nearby residents.

Versailles was no different from Paris in the squalor of this type of latrine. For instance, in 1785 we find seven lodgers in the attics of the Grand Commons, among them one of the king’s dressers and one of the queen’s chaplains, petitioning for the closing down of a fourth-floor privy because “the smell penetrates the lodgings … and infects furnishing, clothes and linen,” as well as “serving certain riff-raff who use it as a meeting place.”

Noble courtiers fared no better. In 1766 the king’s daughter, Madame Adélaïde, demanded new rooms for a lady-in-waiting lodged above the queen’s apartment, “far too near the privy.” Two years earlier the comtesse du Châtelet, who lived in the attics of the south wing, complained of the smell from the nearby privy and also—a glimpse of the cheek-by-jowl living at Versailles—of the fact that she could be seen in her cabinet from its window.

To the smell was added the risk of leaks, whether through the floor of latrines to lodgings beneath them, from which not even the rooms of the royal children were safe, or from iron or lead pipes prone to blockage and corrosion, like the ones that let their contents “leak and poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen.

If people found the latrines closed, they would relieve themselves in the public corridor, as happened in 1741 after a privy in the attics of the north wing was converted into a lodging. People did the same in the first-floor gallery of the south wing. When the newly married dauphin and dauphine were lodged here in 1745, iron barriers were placed in front of the arcades opposite their rooms “to prevent indecency and dirtiness.” In 1762 the comte de Compans complained about the passersby and kitchen boys who “attended to their needs” in an inner courtyard in the same wing, “often breaking his windows,” presumably because he remonstrated with them. Bombelles, an admirer of Versailles under Louis XVI, wrote in his journal that more effort could be made to address the “dirtiness” of the public galleries.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Not being able to argue for the status quo, the powers that be set out to slander our past. Almost every widely held negative belief that I heard about it, turned out to be inaccurate in the way you described.

Pink was for boys and blue was for girls as recently as the victorians.

It's fairly easy to find references in Google Books both ways in the first half of the 20th century, though the only non-fictional contemporary one with an opinion I find asserts that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. This is post-Victorian (and American, besides).

I find nothing from the Victorian era, the only thing I find before the 20th century is this 1833 work, which also asserts that "pink is for girls".

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".

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.

They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.

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.

In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.

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.

Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Because that leads to Christopher Nolan dressing Bronze Age Greeks like they're the Batman.

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