Figure I'll jump in here for a little discussion of the, well, obvious point of discussion here: Video Games.

In my experience, authenticity and/or accuracy is something that gamers may claim they want, but few mean it in any deep sense. The craving for authenticity is the desire for the veneer, not any real depth. I find there to be two important ways one can look at this: The first is that authentic, to them, often more means that it conforms to their own preconcieved notions about the period in question, or even just their biases independent of history; the second is that any desire for accuracy will generally stop at the point where it interfers with game play. Neither of these should be seen monolithically, to be sure, as different people have different notions and wants (I, for example, really want more active 'Standard Issue Rifle' servers in BF1), but both are quite important parts of the discussion.

I'll use a recent example which I'm familiar with, Battlefield 1. As some may recall, it has been the periodic subject of complaint because it is "inaccurate" in its inclusion of POC and women in the game. To focus on one example, in the Russian expansion pack, a female avatar was introduced as the sniper class in the game, something which definitely made some people upset. For some, it was simply that as far as they knew, women didn't fight in the war, so why should they be in the game. As noted, it went against what they percieved to be accurate. Even those who were aware of the Battalion of Death, and the brief deployment into combat for the Kerensky Offensive, a retort I would see was that as it still only meant roughly 2,000 women were deployed into combat, they shouldn't be used in the game. Even if it is technically accurate, their ubiquity in the game thus destroys the authenticity.

This brings us to the second part. Yes, in theory, a single match could see more female game avatars spawn than saw combat as part of the Battalion of Death. But as anyone who has played the game knows, it is mostly populated with SMGs and LMGs, few of which saw widespread use, and a fair number likely were manufactured in the dozens at best. More women saw combat on July 9th, 1917 than Hellriegel M1915s were built, period, but I rarely have seen complaints, or certainly not such pointed ones, about the defaulting to automatic and semi-automatic weapons for almost everyone, in a game set during a conflict fought, for the most part, with bolt action rifles by the regular infantry.

So what this all circles back to is that the BF1 game is decidedly inauthentic by many metrics. It is a fairly standard FPS game, with mechanics that aren't that different from one set in WWII, or beyond for that matter, and is simply skinned to look like it is set between 1914 and 1918. If someone were to do a full reskinning of the game to be set during, say the Korean War, it would probably barely be noticable. But complaints about its authenticity nevertheless are heard, and they help illustrate what people claim to care about. A patch which attempted to "improve accuracy" by restricting access to anything other than bolt action rifles sans optics would be met with almost universal outcry (and me cheering) I'd expect. Yet that would actually be creating a more authentic experience. But not the "authentic experience" that most players seem to care about.

Now at this point I ought to say that it is likely the vast majority of players care about neither examples I am bringing up here. It is a small minority bothered by the presence of women/POC. For most, they are likely fine with that, just like they are fine with way to many automatic weapons. It is authentic enough in both cases for them to be happy. Perhaps they had never heard of the Battalion of Death, but it doesn't break their immersion in the game that, egads, a woman is in the game. Maybe they know a MP18 was pretty rare and everyone should just have Mausers, but at the end of the day they will fudge it and have more fun running and gunning. It just isn't a big deal, and the veneer of authenticity offered by period appropriate uniforms, and weapons which tecnically existed in the period meets the necessary level for them.

So what this all leads up to, in conclusion, is that complaints about the authenticity of an experience offered by a game say a lot about the person complaining. As I've alluded to, I have complaints about BF1, mostly focused on the fact I really want to have a mode which requires bolt action rifles only (there sort of is, but servers rarely have many players). That is the authentic experience I would like to see catered to. The avatars don't bother me, and if anything, I think it is awesome that the designers chose to highlight to contributions of often overlooked contingents like the Battalion of Death, the Harlem Hellfighters, or the various colonial troops who made so many sacrifices fighting a war that was not really theirs. That says something about me, and I'm cool with that. Likewise, someone whose focus is solely on representation in the game, that says something about them... If the point that really breaks your immersion is the over abundance of women in the game - women who absolutely played a part in the conflict, who fought and died, just not necessarily in the millions - that says something about you... (There is also the "I want to complain about everything type, to which the answer is "Then just play Verdun").

I'm not ragging on people who want authenticity in a game - I'm one of them - and not ragging on people for having different ideas of what that means, to a limit. But I am saying that you need to be prepared to accept what your idea of "authenticity" reflects on yourself, and absolutely ragging on people who, in the above cases, are more likely than not driven by their notions of race and gender than any deep-seated commitment to historical fidelity.

In pop music criticism in the 21st century - which also effectively serves as the historiography of pop music history - there has been a massive pushback against the particular assumptions of authenticity of rock and roll.

The book Faking It by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor contrasts Neil Young - a man commonly considered to have rock authenticity - with Billy Joel - a man commonly derided by those who value authenticity in rock. Both of them are of the same generation and their songs are actually quite similar thematically, argue the authors. However, Billy Joel plays piano and writes accomplished, well-crafted songs with influences from musical theatre, and sings with some polish. Neil Young, on the other hand, plays guitar and writes songs that are not particularly well-crafted, but which feel like he has a certain access to his subconscious. As a singer, Young is limited, with a nasal tenor. And all of these things denote authenticity - given his limitations, Young has to mean it when he plays, because he’s not good enough to fake it. However, in Faking It, Barker and Taylor argue that all pop musicians, essentially - both Joel and Young - fake it. Authenticity is in the minds of the audience, not in the music, per se.

And the things that a given group of people find to be authentic is revealing. There’s a group of soul fans who consistently fail to see Motown as soul at all - it’s too white, too Northern, too upwardly mobile, too aimed at the mainstream audiences. It doesn’t have the grit of the Stax records of Otis Redding and Sam And Dave, etc, it’s too sweetened. For these people, the authenticity of soul is attached to its lack of refinement. And this is something that consistently runs through views on much black music - the rawer, the more sexual and basic, the better. When of course, African-American composers have composed lots of beautiful, complex, refined music that also deserves to be celebrated. What these people are looking for, often, in African-American music, is a sort of yin to the yang, a them to the us, a receptacle for the feelings they’re not comfortable with in themselves.

But this is something that’s not really in the music; it’s in people’s heads. Stax’s music was highly refined in certain ways that are perhaps less obvious than Motown’s. And Motown certainly features tons of monstrous performances - Levi Stubbs was one hell of a singer, and as much as Marvin Gaye wanted to be a crooner, there was also part of him that could really let loose.

So it’s probably the rule that - with music, at least - anything that you find inauthentic says more about you than about the music per se.

Pop music is always a careful construction and it’s always mediated by commerce - it’s in the name of the genre. And by pop music I also mean hip-hop, rock, metal, Americana, whatever. In this day and age it’s often easier to make music that’s relatively shiny than music that has just the right amount of sounding a bit lo-fi (I mean, everyone has GarageBand or the like on their computers/tablets, or can get it). That band on an indie label mostly leaves to join a major label not because they really want to sell out, but because they eventually realise that labels are all the same and that the indie label will screw you over too. The things that you notice as being authentic or inauthentic - out of the myriad of ways in which the music becomes untrue to the deepest heart of the musician, and the way it’s mediated by culture and society and perceptions of what will be a hit, etc, etc - are...interesting.

Ultimately, the things that ended up being seen as authentic in pop music discourse for much of the second half of the 20th century reflected the values of white middle-class masculinity - both the positive and healthy values of that, and the negative and ugly ones.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to think about the question: Why is that thing that’s inauthentic - out of all the ways a piece of music is not really ‘authentic’ - why is that one the one that stands out to you?

This is a debate that froths up with regard to fashion history every time a period drama movie or tv show hits it big. The claim of "historical accuracy" can be used to draw in interest by the producers and to show one's good taste by fans - if something is accurate, then it is offering something objectively good in conjunction with the subjective quality of the storytelling and acting - but quite often it turns out that what it has is, to steal from /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, the veneer of authenticity.

Outlander is the best example of this that I can think of. The costume designer has given many interviews regarding the accuracy of the costuming in the show and the amount of research that went into it, and the supposed accuracy is touted by most fans. However, the vast majority of the costuming is either a problematic interpretation of eighteenth century artwork/clothing or a confusing invention.

[Claire's basic Scottish outfit](http://outlander.wikia.com/wiki/Claire_Fraser?file=Outlander-Season-1B_Claire-Randall-Caitriona-Balfe-1024x683.jpg#Season One) is a great example. ([Here's](http://outlander.wikia.com/wiki/Claire_Fraser?file=Ols1_111-%281%29.png#Season One) another version with a slightly different jacket.) People love this outfit - I've seen it reproduced for cosplay many times - because it has an authentic feel. The jacket is a thick, rustic wool in a dark-toned blue; the petticoat is a dark brown wool suggestive of brown sheep or some natural dye. Visible lacing at the sleeve head and across the front scream "old" because we no longer need to lace anything but shoes. In some scenes, she wears [chunky knitwear](http://outlander.wikia.com/wiki/Claire_Fraser?file=OUT-104-2.jpg#Season One) that is also a) rustic-looking wool and b) brown. It all feels authentic.

But it's highly inaccurate. Sleeves were not being laced on in the eighteenth century; knitted cowls were completely unknown, and any knitted gloves/stockings/etc. would have been made on much smaller-gauge needles; petticoats were much less voluminous and heavy than this; shifts didn't have drawstrings at the neckline. But it's the very things that make the outfit inaccurate (for the most part - the princess seam on the jacket isn't doing anything for anyone) that make it look attractively old-fashioned and different - that is, authentic! The petticoat's great width, for instance, means that it has to be pleated really heavily to the waist, a construction technique we don't tend to do anymore and which emphasizes how full the skirt is, and we also don't wear very full skirts on a daily basis, period.

I've written a little bit before about the "accuracy," which Commie very correctly suggests we should consider as "authenticity," of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of naval novels, as well as the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Comparing the books and movie is a bit of an apples-to-llamas comparison, as a series of 20 books (plus one unfinished) is somewhat unfair to stack up against a standalone movie that incorporates portions of at least a couple of O'Brian's novels. Not that that will stop me.

Part of what's complicated about "accuracy" vs "authenticity" is that we are always reconstructing what we know about the past from material that's often fragmentary or not well sourced, and usually is coming from the perspective of elites, or sometimes people of subaltern status that elites write about. There are few authentic "lower-deck" naval voices from the Napoleonic period, and despite memoirs from sailors being a popular genre post-Trafalgar, those are usually highly filtered to be made acceptable for public consumption. So while we may be able to get a fairly authentic view in fiction of what an officer's life might be like, we get more and more distorted in time as we go down the chain of command toward the common sailor.

So it's perhaps not particularly surprising that O'Brian's tale is told through the eyes of two people, one a ship's captain for whose exploits O'Brian could draw on actual naval actions of the period, and the other a neophyte to the naval world through whose eyes we can have things explained to ourselves, being filthy landlubbers. So when the capstan on HMS Surprise breaks and Jack says "We shall weigh with a voyol to the jeer-capstan," and goes on to explain "Watch, now. He makes it fast to the cable - he reeves the jeer-fall through it - the jeer-fall is brought to its capstan, with the standing part belayed to the bitts. So you get a direct runner-purchase instead of a dead nip, do you understand?", we can be fairly sure that something technical is going on which we can allow to pass over our heads if we don't know what he's describing, while if you look into the technical details you see that he's actually describing something that ships did on occasion.

The sailors themselves in O'Brian's telling are well-drawn characters, but we get far less of their backstory than we do of the officers' -- we know Barrett Bonden, the captain's coxswain, was born between two lower-deck guns on HMS Indefatigable and grew up in Seven Dials, then ran away to sea as a boy. That's all completely authentic to the period, and the other common sailors show some of the same background, even if we just see it in flashes (e.g. the sailmaker "plying his needle with the desperate speed he had learned in the sweat-shop.").

What's interesting to me the differences between the books and the movie, though, is that the movie quite consciously changes some things about the story, likely to please its audience, and unconsciously changes some others. In The Far Side of the World, Surprise is sent to pursue the (real-life) USS Essex into the Pacific, where it had been sent to prey upon British whalers. In the movie M&C:TFSOTW, Essex becomes the French ship Acheron, likely so as not to offend American audiences; and an entire plot point revolving around the unlucky midshipman Hollom and the gunner's wife, in which the two become lovers and then are murdered by the gunner, is cut out. Indeed, there are no women in the movie at all (other than a cameo of Aubrey's wife that he looks at, and a brief scene of the ship touching at Brazil), and no persons of color, while the books often feature women and POC aboard ships. (A "dumb" -- that is, mute -- bosun's mate, Alfred King, is described by O'Brian as a "negro" in Master and Commander, for example).

It would actually be more accurate to have the people O'Brian describes represented in the movie, both in the sense that people of color and women were unremarkable on board ships, and in the sense that the movie would have more fidelity to O'Brian's work.

It seems to me that visual representations of history -- movies in particular, but also video games -- have fallen into the trap of presenting the past as a mostly white space, and that while they are (in the modern era) attempting to be more accurate about how they portray the past they are not there yet. I answered a question a week or so ago about whether it would be odd to see a black person on the Tube in wartime London -- London, the capital of a global empire and a country where black people had lived since at least the 16th century if not before. I think this is indicative of the point that u/georgy_k_zhukov was getting at in their answer:

In my experience, authenticity and/or accuracy is something that gamers may claim they want, but few mean it in any deep sense. The craving for authenticity is the desire for the veneer, not any real depth.

I do think that as people who study history, we can push back against these narratives in interesting ways. To veer a bit off topic, I really appreciated u/freedmenspatrol's use of terminology in this answer about George Washington, for example:

Our patient is George Washington, age sixty-seven. He went riding about his slave labor camps on Thursday, December 12, 1799 and remained abroad for five hours.

...

He marked some trees for cutting, then came home and wrote a letter complaining about the cattle pen at one of his slave labor camps.

...

Washington sends Martha to retrieve two wills, one of which she is to burn. The other one, which frees the people he enslaved, she was to keep. Four people he and Martha enslaved remained with him in the room: Caroline, Charlotte, Molly, and Christopher. As Martha's property, Washington's will would not free them.

...

Washington ... noticed that Christopher hadn't had a seat since morning and told him to take a load off. It was the last command he gave to an enslaved person, after a lifetime of stealing their labor and lives for his profit.

because the deliberate use of descriptors for things that we often glide over or that have become meaningless (slave labor camp vs. plantation, enslaved person vs. slave) draws the comparison for us more sharply.

In any case, I'm rambling. I would sum this up by saying that any work of fiction is, of course, fictional. I like history; I appreciate the use of historical terminolgy and research to lend historical authenticity in O'Brian's work and derivatives of it, and I think that this authenticity can point toward accuracy, even if we can't ever obtain it precisely.

I wonder if the all encompassing nature of fiction-the fact that the characters must have outward material lives and worlds to live in, social relationships and inner lives within themselves-limits the accuracy of fiction. They must live in a whole world, reconstructed by the author. This is a much more comprehensive reconstruction of the past than historians attempt. And this world will not be the 'real world' of the past. Partly because authors are creating the world to fit the work of art-the narrative and characters must come first, and narrative demands will smooth out the world's rough edges (the ones historians study). Moreover the author has their own ideas and preconceptions and themes in mind and the background world of the narrative is shaped by that. Romantics like Scott write narratives of courage and individuals triumphing by their virtue. More cynical authors create worlds that are arbitrary, unjust and hypocritical. We often praise the latter as 'realistic' but it is also artificial. These thematic concerns shape politics, religion, mores and everything else. Hilary Mantel and Robert recount same events differently not necessarily because they are students of history interpreting the evidence differently but because they are authors interested in different stories.

This is more meta than method; and I suppose there are more qualified people to discuss the creation and purpose of both a work of history and that of a work of fiction. At the same time, I think there is something I may say on the way I approach a work of history – which, besides immediate fruition, is for the purpose of answering question on this sub – that may give a different point of view on the subject, since I am neither a historian by profession, nor by education. It is also possible that this is a very personal take on the subject and therefore not really representative, but I won't ever know if I don't post this...

A work of history has a very well defined purpose; often it is openly stated too: think of an abstract or an introduction and a well established methodology: think of sources and how they were chosen. The author has a reasonable expectation that the reader will use the work for the stated intention. A study on per hectare productivity of wheat in the XVIII Century in Northern Italy should be thorough on the subject chosen and probably include some references to major events such as wars, epidemics or events otherwise affecting the agrarian population and their relation with the urban environment – it's purpose is not to provide a general picture of XVIII Century Italy, and it should not be used to draw such a picture.

That's a technical work though, that I have been reading because I am trying to write something on the “battle for grain” and a general treatment of it has so far eluded me.

There's more general history work. For example this fairly new (2009) Emilio Gentile's “La nostra sfida alle stelle - Futuristi in Politica”. It's also a bit more pop, with pictures and everything, but the author feels the necessity to clarify the purpose of the work: the politics of the futurists is a small piece in the mosaic of Italian history of the first twenty years of 1900. […] The political experience of the futurist movement deserves attention to better understand the role of national radicalism in the crisis of the liberal system and in the origin of fascism.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a history of the Italian Socialist Party will abstract from many technical details, even in its attempt to provide a general picture of societal change – unless those details are inherently relevant to the Socialist Party. Therefore it will discuss political legislation, it will go into details on the political reasons behind a major strike. The author will often explain why a certain detail has been included or not, or point out where scholarship is lacking or indecisive, in order to avoid the pitfall of excessive technicality – notes and bibliography will serve that purpose if the reader finds it worth further inquiry.

But those technical details are irrelevant for the work's stated purpose. Let's see them in more detail! What kind of food was available at the market, what kind of food did the people like, what recipes were on the cover of cooking magazines, what was the best selling book of the year, what was playing in theater, what kind of medicines were available, how much was a pension worth, when did the average public worker retire, what did boys and girls do on a first date, what was the dress code for the summer, how much time did a kid spend with their mother and father, what did a child learn in school, what did men prey for, and so on.

Now, to us these are relevant things. Things that make up our life, together with a thousand others. And there is of course well established history on the subject – many popular questions on similar issues receive great answers on this sub as well, showcasing a general agreement of contemporary historiography that those are relevant subjects of historical research. But you could read a thousand history books without ever finding more than a footnote on them, as long as you don't chose a work that focuses on them.

Which brings me to the point: historical research is not world building. It does not aim at providing an environment for the reader to inhabit. That's the work of fiction.

But before moving to that; I don't think this is purely a matter of intention: it's a matter of possibility. The reason it is so hard to answer a question about the life of your average Joe is because average Joe is not a historical figure: he is an avatar.

He belongs in a fictional work.

Fictional works do not come with a statement of purpose, they do not seek to establish their boundaries in a well defined way. They strive to be open – games especially – as anything trying to provide the impression of life has to. The idea is to create a world where the player, or the reader, can develop their own agency: to achieve this, yes, the author needs to provide an environment that feels realistic enough for the user to be invested. Problem is that the fictional world does not need to be historically accurate to be realistic, to feel realistic, or to provide the chance to be invested in it. As long as it avoids that breaking point of “it wouldn't work like that”.

I have had the misfortune of watching a movie once - “Captain Corelli's Mandolin". Which to me was basically a constant breaking point. I was never invested. I never believed. If I hadn't known that some events in the movie actually happened, I would have believed it to be entirely fictional – not because of those events being too outlandish, but because the movie chose to depict its characters in a way that (at least to me) felt neither realistic nor relatable. They were movie characters inhabiting what had to be a fictional world and I didn't care for them one bit.

Yet some of them were even real people. And maybe the movie wasn't as bad as I remember (no, it was – I'll never mention it again) but I believe we can all agree that a general work of fiction needs to be consistent to achieve realism. Yet how is that achieved? I'd argue that being realistic is not a problem of fitting in real names and dates – it is not an issue of being accurate to something that existed in reality.

The Society for Creative Anachronism is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe.

is the first sentence of the explanation at http://sca.org/, and boy howdy is it a fib and a half. What is now seen as the first event was a backyard costume party loosely based on Ivanhoe and on the Last Tournament. They decided it was a lot of fun and wanted to have more tournaments.

A purpose like at the top was put in a few years later, when incorporation and more formalization happened. But before that, the organization had come up with a lot of customs, often enough made up on the spur of the moment but then quickly ossifying into granite. And most of the participants were and are fantasy readers.

So there has been a tension from near the start: accuracy to what? To the actual Middle Ages? Or to Romantic ideals, fantasy feeling, and what people like? Or to the ossified traditions of the SCA? For many, SCA history, and/or perceptions of history, are more important than "wie es eigentlich gewesen". (Q: How many members of the West Kingdom does it take to change a candle? A: What do you mean, change it? That candle has been there for 50 years, that's the ancient and honorable candle, there's nothing wrong with it, ...)

The long-lived dichotomy between actual history and, well, everything else, has often been characterized as "Fun Mavens versus Authenticity Nazis". (Imagine the joy of the history fans being called Nazis, especially lately.) The soi disant "fun" side sometimes uses the nominalist argument "It's the Society of Creative Anachronism", which is itself interesting: fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley came up with "The Society for Creative Anachronism" on the spur of the moment, because the city application to reserve a park for the second event had a blank for the name of the group.

As for real history versus SCA history: the SCA's geographical hierarchy has only the loosest agreement with history, the award structure is mind-spinningly inauthentic, the actual social structure (status, relationship, influence) has limited connection to the formal structures of the SCA or to real history, ... Nationalist fervor for Ansteorra, for example, is a major tug on the heart strings for many locals. Adherance to the Arthurian-type ideals and high status of knighthood is a driver for many. Or it may be a household with a devotion to some specific area and time, or just a devotion to each other.

Someone with more insight, better writing ability, and frankly, more interest, could write volumes on the SCA and authenticity. But I'm also not sure whether anyone would be interested in reading it.

• Constraints of reality: e.g., people almost invariably wear modern glasses, and I'm going to have to stick to modern sneakers. One major reason for the awards structures being a dog's breakfast is that nobody has actual money, land, or jurisdiction to give out.
• Heraldry (my old area) deals with registration of arms and names -- and name registration itself is ahistoric. For our sins we have a three-way tug: authenticity, what people want (Shannon Caitriona the Gypsy Wanderer is not that far of an outlier), and administrative convenience. This may be closest to the game play example, where for "administrative" read "coding".
• Dance (my new love): for pre-17th C, we've got few sources, some are new, and many are thin. Yet dance was an important social function then -- but not enough to describe how to do it in enough detail for us.
• "The Middle Ages as they ought to have been." This is a common statement, and explanation for things like not having slavery or serfdom, public floggings, anti-Christian pogroms, et cetera. E.g., the recent abdication of the crown of Caid. Their defenders argue that they had Norse personae, and the trim was authentic for them. Detractors agree that it was a skillful reproduction of a Snartemo V baldric ... covered with swastikas and HHs, and the Nazis coveted the sword and searched for it during the war (the Norweigans hid it). Summary.

This is a topic I find interesting but challenging -- as a writer and reader of fiction I really enjoy being able to recognize a writer's research into historical particulars, and it makes me smile when I spot something in a book or a film that I was just reading about in a research text. I appreciate when an author draws out resonance across the centuries, and shows how familiar the past and the people populating it can be. But some historical mindsets are difficult to capture in fiction because they're so alien to modern mindsets, and I'm not sure where I draw the line as a reader between an authentic-feeling invocation of historical attitudes and a heavy-handed reminder that because people in the past had different values and expectations, this line of dialogue or this passage of narration is our cue to nod knowingly because as 21st century people we know the old-timey characters are wrong. For instance, I appreciate the depiction of Early Modern witchcraft and religious belief in the movie The Witch because there's no wink and nod to the audience that we're supposed to think we're better equipped for baffling misery than these 1630s New Englanders are, that we have deeper emotional lives than they do, that we know better than these characters what their fate will be because we don't teach our children from catechisms or wear hats and caps or believe unbaptized children's souls are bound for Hell. The film doesn't span the entirety of Early Modern experience, but it engages with the anxieties and values of a specific place and time seriously and respectfully. But at the same time, I'm pretty certain that my sense of that as both respectful and somehow sincere or authentic has to do with my own personal background (from a household that did 2 out of those 3 things) and the experience of other works that feature that tip of the hat, either humorously or seriously, to the expectation of a viewer's modern perspective. (Sometimes even when that "modern" perspective has grown hopelessly dated in the intervening years between a film or novel's release -- as a gay reader I wince when I read 20th century historical fiction and hit the inevitable drift of veiledly Freudian explanations of why a [14th century European monarch/figure from Classical history/etc.] was a mid-20th-century-style homosexual, and I'm sure readers 50 years from now will wince when they read circa-2018 depictions of identity set in any other era. Not because those depictions are wrong or malicious or not in earnest, but because it always feels a little bit like 1960s Hollywood costumers trying to sew medieval gowns with 1960s constructions and fabrics. We're limited by what we take for granted and what we use to fill in the gaps of past experience.

Someone I know in the Society for Creative Anachronism (Bruce Miller) mentions that he asks a couple of questions to spark discussion about authenticity. In the SCA, "period" as a noun is pre-17th C Western European culture. As an adjective, it means loosely something conforming more or less to those cultures and times.

I sometimes ask which of these two artifacts is more period -- a Celtic penannular brooch made of platinum, or a rocket-powered hang-glider -- as a way to explore the concept of "period". The brooch would fit seamlessly into our reenactment ... except it could not possibly have existed before 1600, because before 1600 they couldn't melt and cast platinum (even assuming they had a supply). The hang-glider has a jarringly modern feel ... but every element can be found in medieval and Renaissance writings.