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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8467162" data-attributes="member: 42582">I feel that [USER=463]@S'mon[/USER]'s comment is accurate.The late Australian historian Inga Clendinnen wrote <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2006/09/the-history-question" target="_blank">a good essay about the relationship between history (the discipline) and historical fiction</a>. The essay itself is paywalled, but the letters are not. From <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/correspondence/correspondence-alan-atkinson" target="_blank">one of them</a>:When I was about two-thirds through my teaching career, I convinced myself that most undergraduates, when they start learning history, don’t really believe in the distinct reality of the past. Without concentrated effort and without trained or self-trained imagination, it is often too hard to comprehend the existence of human beings through long periods of time different from our own. A proper intellectual grasp of remoteness and of distance, whether of time or space, is difficult enough in itself. It is something which began to be attempted by the mass of educated people in the nineteenth century. Taking on board the lived experience of human beings fundamentally like – but also fundamentally unlike – oneself in such faraway circumstances is even harder. The task of teaching and of writing history is to persuade students and readers that the past is equally real with the present. . . . Clendinnen is an historian of unusual ability, and her essay is a crucial reminder of what the discipline at its best stands for. The past, as she says, is a very strange place. Understanding it in anything like a satisfactory way calls not only for prodigious quantities of accurate information. It also depends on sustained and rigorous imaginative effort. It requires a difficult balance between sympathy and detachment, and, on top of that (as Clendinnen makes beautifully clear), an understanding that there are some aspects of the human experience which it is impossible to penetrate. . . . The strangeness and self-sufficiency of the past is nowhere more obvious than in the conversations its inhabitants had with each other, free of any sense that their remote descendants might be listening in. Similarly, the intricate difficulty of writing well about the past is nowhere more painful than when we try to decode what we hear, especially when there are two or more voices in play.<a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/correspondence/correspondence-anna-clark" target="_blank">Another</a> describes what it meansto do history: to constantly reconcile judging the past from our own present values and empathising with people from another age; to understand how historical interpretations change over time; and to consider different points of view.RPGing is fiction, and often tropish fiction at that. At it's best it can involve imaginative projection into the circumstances of another. But I don't think it normally has the disciplined attention to "prodigious quantities of accurate information" and the disciplined "balance between sympathy and detachment", the reconciliation of "judging . . . from our own present values [with] empathising with people from another age" that would enable it to generate genuine understanding of the past.</blockquote>

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