January Meme: No Time Like the Present

[selenak]

Thoughts and feelings on historical fiction that projects modern opinions onto characters in the past.To be fair: to a degree, everyone does this. No matter whether they research well enough to write a thesis or just have read the wiki entries. Simply because every writer is a product of their time, influenced by everything that happened to them.

Comments

[kathyh]

when to me part of what makes these people full of rich complexities is that in some ways, they really were different from us, and the products of their times

I think part of the problem, certainly for the middle ages and early modern period, is that it is very hard for a 21st century person to understand the way religion permeated everyone's life. I presume Maria Theresia's attitude to extramarital sex was a religious objection (without needing to be indoctrinated by a "wicked" Jesuit)?

[selenak]

Indeed. Re: the presence of religion everywhere - haven't seen a fictional Mozart yet who is capable of saying, as historical Wolfgang Amadé did, that he was glad to hear Voltaire died like a dog. (Voltaire didn't, but it was a popular tale among hardcore Catholics at the time.) Mind you, this was the age of the Enlightenment, and of course there were already plenty of people taking other attitudes. Including Catholics. (Like Maria Theresia's son Joseph, to name the most prominent example.) But for her, it was still a core part of who she was, and always would be.

(Which doesn't mean she could never make compromises, both for pragmatic and humane reasons, see here.)