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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10504 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.

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?

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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