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Excavating the Past for Stories
The problem with talking about the past is that there’s no one “past” we can all learn from. The truism that history is written by the winners is underlined when we try to find out about any under-represented group (which in general, and certainly in the west, means anyone who isn’t white, male, and reasonably affluent). Because there aren’t a lot of primary sources (2nd-century slaves in Greece didn’t exactly pen their memoirs, for example), we need to dig more to find lost voices. And we have to be careful to account for bias in reading the actual sources as well — for example, everything we know about the druids in the British Isles is what Julius Caesar, their sworn enemy, wrote about them.
I’m speaking now from the perspective of a writer of fiction, but one who wants to get it right. There’s nothing more annoying than reading a novel and coming across a glaring mistake — it makes you lose trust in the writer. So it’s always been important for me to create fiction that nestles inside fact, so to speak.
This is especially true when it comes to excavating the past to find women’s voices. My academic work was in history, and in particular I specialized in medieval Church history, so that means I pretty much know the patriarchal line about everything! And, surprise, surprise, women are pretty much conspicuous by their absence for whole swaths of history. I…
