Can Historians Use Fiction to Argue About the Past?

Historian John Hatcher attempted to answer this question in a recent article in which he discussed his latest book, The Black Death: A Personal History. Hatcher wrote:

"My new book is not a conventional history book. It combines solid history with fiction. Having studied and taught about the Black Death for more than thirty years I wanted to find a new way of adding to our knowledge and understanding of this massively important but very well-worked historical event. I therefore decided to try to write an intimate history of the tumultuous years of the mid-fourteenth century seen through the eyes of those who lived and died in the ferociously lethal epidemic. It was to be a history from the inside, with the hindsight, overviews, judgments and perspectives of the twenty-first century historian banished from the text."

"But I soon found it impossible to reconstruct in a deep and satisfying manner the experiences of ordinary people in the tumultuous years between 1345 and 1351 by using surviving sources in the conventional manner. For even the very best of the local records, including those of the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows that provide the foundations of this study, reveal frustratingly little in a direct fashion about what was heard, thought, believed or done by ordinary villagers and their priests. The fourteenth century has left no diaries, reminiscences or correspondence, and precious few sustained commentaries. In fact, there is scarcely any truly personal information about the mass of men and women who lived at the time, for they were illiterate and their rulers and betters were not concerned to write much about them. Surviving records reveal instead the motives and priorities of the lords who commissioned them and the clerks and administrators who compiled them, by concentrating on such largely impersonal matters as legal disputes, community regulations, landholdings, the exercise of seignorial authority and the extraction of seigniorial payments."

Hatcher wrote that he realized that there just wasn't anything in any archives that would let him tell the story he wanted to tell. He came to the conclusion that "if this hidden story is to be told it cannot be by using orthodox historical methods." He continued:

"This does not mean that historians should leave its telling entirely to novelists, dramatists and filmmakers. Acceptable historical methods frequently proceed from the known to the unknown, and historians commonly draw heavily on the facts in order to tackle issues and answer questions beyond where the facts take them. I have tried to do just this, but in a decidedly more explicit and adventurous fashion. The central part of this book is constructed in the form of a narrative written by a contemporary a few years after the Black Death, and it therefore contains speculation as well as specifics, fiction as well as fact. Indeed, it more closely resembles docudrama or creative nonfiction than traditional history, and it contains dialogue. But, as far as possible, the recreations are based on what is known to have happened, and the attitudes and ideas expressed by the characters are derived from what contemporary sources would lead us to expect. Even the language the characters use, though modernized, is drawn heavily, and frequently directly, from fourteenth-century sources, as the endnotes testify."...

"My motives were those of a historian: to teach the truth about the period in so far as we understand it, and to reveal the lost history of the Black Death, rather than to invent it or simply tell a good story. I do not know whether many of the events in this book took place in Walsham and its region in the way they are described. But I believe they are likely to have done so in a broadly similar fashion in many places throughout England. Nevertheless, much of the book remains an invention, a wide-ranging speculation on what might have taken place rather than a much more constrained account of what we know did take place."

"I was encouraged in my writing by a number of supportive colleagues, friends and experts in this field, who found the format that I had chosen threw welcome light on some important themes very poorly illuminated by surviving sources. Recreating and playing out scenes from the time of the Black Death in which the documents we have were compiled and used, and where the beliefs, arguments and sentiments we read about were expressed, debated and questioned, can lead to the reinforcement or the questioning of our assumptions. At the least, I hope that this book may serve as an accessible means of entering into an unfamiliar distant world during a period of unprecedented crisis."

I think that Hatcher's approach to his subject could open a new door for historians who want to bring fresh insights to their areas of specialization. Integrating fiction into serious historical scholarship could be a way in which academic historians may be able to broaden their readership and bring the reading public good historical scholarship. (Quality historical studies are something that are not usually found on the shelves of Barnes & Noble.) I'm looking forward to reading Hatcher's book.