Why historical fiction?

By Wapster - 1932 Standard Rolleiflex, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10977495

Recently, I was asked why I thought history was vital to my story. An interesting question, so I thought I might write a line or two about it. I don't know if history is *vital* to any story, but I do believe it's vital that people engage with history. I imagine the intent behind the question was to get at why I would risk putting modern readers off by placing my story in the past. After all, who cares about the past? Why would a modern reader give a fig about the twelfth century when there are so many current cultural issues being interrogated now? 

I guess I see the question as a false distinction. If history were a factory, its product, its output would be culture. “Current” issues are the offspring of historical issues; there isn’t a modern talking point that doesn’t have a precursor from the past. Sure, it’s a lot more obvious when one side of a debate is actively taking a “traditional” stance, but calls for equality for women for example, harken back to ideas of equality that go back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Maybe the Greeks didn’t have women in mind, but the concept of equality they developed was added to the historical fabric and its thread has run into the more recent past where it’s been taken up by people the Greek philosophers might not have intended. And that’s fine. No one owns a cultural concept. Ideas are in the public domain. 

I’m not a determinist; I don’t believe that we’re puppets of history without free will. But I think most things that seem “new” are just remixes of other and older concepts. I just think that there are so many ideas out there being remixed and refactored that “new” things  are created, sort of like intellectual gene splicing. Even technology shares a lot of DNA with the past: what’s a cell phone for? To communicate. To send messages. Smartphones mean we communicate differently than the Greeks did — who preferred to sit around a table with wine in a symposium — but the necessity of staying close to the people we want to hasn’t changed at all. 

So where does all this leave an historical novelist? My writing is aimed at presenting history in an entertaining way but also in an accurate way to help people engage with the past.