What Are the Dangers of Using Fiction in Historical Documents?
Fiction and history tend to go hand in hand, if nothing else by simple dint of the fact that many authors have a bias, whether they see it or not. The end result is that the historian is expected to be able to discern the difference between fiction and fact, and, while historical fiction can tell us a lot, the price for this is constant interrogation of the text.
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Factual Accuracy
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Factual accuracy is the most important thing a historian must look for when examining fiction in historical documents. Any fictional account written at the time will inevitably conflate facts and people together in order to make the story flow better. As a result, if extra research is not done around the topic, the historian will operate from a flawed foundation from the very start.
Bias
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Primary sources are by definition often biased, as the author is not aware of the way the events he is living through or writing about color his perceptions. One of the best examples of this is Bede, who, in "Historia Ecclesiastica," described the ghastly pagan rites enacted by the heathen population of England prior to their conversion by Pope Gregory the Great. This was, it was later discovered, extremely biased, but Bede's words have still colored centuries of study.
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Omission
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What's missing is often as important as what isn't, and again, Bede is a good example of this. Saint Wilfrid, a direct contemporary, is almost completely absent from Bede's works, for example. This is not because St. Wilfrid wasn't important to the Church at the time but, it seems likely, more because Bede didn't agree with him and as a result chose to write "around" his role in history.
Empathy Versus Distance
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Empathy is a tool many historians favor, allowing them to step into the shoes of our predecessors and try and understand their lives on our terms. However, while empathy has many advantages, it also has several disadvantages, the most obvious of which is lack of distance. Clinical distance, the ability to stand out from the crowd and see the whole picture, is equally vital and, by relying on fiction over fact, the historian is in danger of losing that distance in return for extra, but flawed, emotional focus.
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References
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