With all the ways to tell an engaging story, a textbook seems like a dry and irrelevant narrative. It is, however, precisely that. One thought I kept returning to during the readings, activities, and discussions this week was that history is a constructed narrative. Each historian, by necessity, must decide what will and will not be included in their telling of history. No one is capable of telling the complete whole of every side, faction, opinion, and event at a certain point in history. This particular module gave me much to think about, especially as topics of historical accuracy and storytelling are relevant to my thesis. It is also relevant to the assigned reading this week, which explored different uses of digital storytelling to present historical narratives. In particular, I found the text-based choose-your-own-adventure story The Road to Canterbury1 to be very entertaining. It presents a narrative that balances well the historical facts of the pilgrimages to Canterbury that took place in the late 1300s with the audience expectations about the events and the interactive format of the website.
I found especially interesting the aspects of the journey that were adapted, or omitted, for the modern audience. For example, the names of multiple people in the traveling party central to the story reference actual historical figures from the time. One man shares his surname with Geoffrey Chaucer,2 who wrote The Canterbury Tales. This is a clever nod to one of the most famous literary works on the popular pilgrimage journey, and several other characters have personalities or names meant to reference historical figures. It is a clever way to meet user expectations while still presenting a nominally accurate and plausible narrative. The risk, of course, with a non-linear historical story is twofold. On the one hand, the usability of actual historical figures is limited by factual information about the character. This can present awkward boundaries in a story or risk an ahistorical narrative, which damages the credibility of the story as a whole. On the other hand, modern media and portrayals of history have given the audience, the users, a set of expectations about history that may be wildly inaccurate. I am sure many people can think of a “historically accurate” movie which was torn to shreds as an inaccurate disaster once historians saw it. I find it difficult as a historian to watch productions supposedly set in areas and time periods I am familiar with. Despite the sea of cringing historians, popular media informs the audience about the time it is set in. Even when it is known to be inaccurate, many people will still associate what they see as the “truth.” 3
Though I do not have the time or energy to go into the many sides of the historical and modern debate on “authenticity” and its value, or lack thereof, in any depth, it is a major concern in historical storytelling. The 2021 book The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism4 covers the many issues on this topic in three main ways. It asks first: whose version of history is considered authentic? (Spoiler: the answer is white men) Second, it asks how inaccuracies in media come to be, and how they persist. Last, it asks how creators who claim to be creating a historical narrative go about it doing so, and how their methods of constructing an “authentic” representation result in the final products and are taken in by the audience. This book endeavors to present a balanced investigation as to how and why inaccuracies appear in media, and is careful not to accuse intention behind many of these choices. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History5 2012 does not do that. Trouillot presents history as a textbook and history as a game or interactive story, digital or otherwise, as the constructed narrative I mentioned earlier. Even a historian writing an “objective” history has to strike a balance between expectation and accuracy, as Heartfield did in The Road to Canterbury. However, Trouillot proposes that the very idea of “objectivity” is disingenuous, as all historians are actors and narrators. Further, every writer is constrained by their situation and the power structures they exist in. A publisher may disagree with the content of a narrative and refuse to publish it; governments or other powers may seek to silence it; or the historian themselves may silence large parts of a historical narrative, purposefully or not. To Trouillot, power creates silences, silences reinforce power, and then power seeks to enforce those silences to continue the cycle. What is silenced becomes either lost entirely or ingrained in society as unimportant. This is, for instance, why there is still a need for and differentiation of “Women’s History” classes.
All of these considerations are why I had comparatively less to say in class than I usually do. To say there was a lot on my mind would be an understatement. Still, questions of authenticity vs. expectation create a curious situation for modern historians and digital storytelling. You can be as accurate as you want, but the divide between accuracy and expectation can be wide. Still, I believe projects like Heartfield’s The Road to Canterbury, and many of the digital history projects our class will produce this semester, are great ways to bridge the gap and present a history that is engaging and thought-provoking. Hopefully we can present this history and survive this semester without losing our minds. Okay, hopefully I can survive this semester without losing my mind.
- Heartfield, Kate. “The Road to Canterbury.” Choice of Games, n.d. https://www.choiceofgames.com/road-to-canterbury/. ↩︎
- The Wikipedia article for Geoffrey Chaucer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer ↩︎
- See How Historical Films Misuse Color by Thomas Brodey https://tragedyandfarce.blog/2021/08/21/how-historical-films-misuse-color/
Or 6 Ways Medieval Life Is Misrepresented in Movies by Nitya Rao https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/misconceptions/medieval-life-misrepresentations-movies
As just two (or 7) of the many, many examples of this.
↩︎ - Alvestad, Karl , and Robert Houghton , ed. The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism. New Directions in Medieval Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Accessed October 8, 2026. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167452. ↩︎
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. 2015 Kindle Edition. 1995. Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America: Beacon Press, n.d. ↩︎
Anna,
Your thoughts this week about authenticity vs expectations are important. As a historian that tends to write history about silenced perspectives, I always feel that it is crucial for me to dig deeper because I do have the white male perspective. I have the urge to learn about other perspectives than the ones that I was taught growing up. I often find it difficult to relay the type of scholarship I produce to my family, who were also brainwashed. It is always a delicate balance to pull out the relevant lessons that I think they should take away from my work.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Best,
Andrew
I think you raised some excellent points about authenticity and historical omissions. However, I must admit that if it’s a fun movie and someone shows up in full plate armor in 9th-century Britain, I am not complaining. On a more serious note, I enjoyed Kate Heartfield’s game even if it may not have been a fully accurate depiction of late Medieval England.
Trouillot points out that just getting the facts right does not produce an objective record. Curating a set of facts to create a narrative is ubiquitous: almost everything you read is written that way.[1] After many years of policy analysis, I find it is best for my mental health not to dwell on it.
[1] It is also the path to being a successful consultant.
Anna, your analysis here really looks at the big picture of the choices a historian makes when considering the very act of writing history, and it was a really insightful read! Your referencing of medieval scholarship and Trouillot in consideration with the Road to Canterbury really ties everything together in looking closely at how histories and digital storytelling is a curated experience