Presentism and pseudo-medieval fantasy

Presentism is the projection of modern values and knowledge onto depictions of the past or of pre-industrial civilizations in fiction. It is frustratingly common for writers to write historical and fantasy fiction with the assumption that their characters hold modern values and scientific views. This is complete nonsense, of course.

For example, the idea of natural ecology and conservationism is an entirely modern discovery. In the pre-modern period people were completely ignorant of it and that is why they did things like hunt buffalo to extinction and destroy forests. Those primitive screw heads had no idea that natural resources only existed in limited amounts. Not that you would know this from reading fantasy fiction, where conservationism is commonly the motivation of various characters or monsters like the druid and the unicorn.

For example, many bestiaries commonly mention evolution, ecology and so forth as though this was common knowledge in medieval times. It was not and as a matter of fact medieval historians had absolutely ridiculous ideas about how the world worked and what existed in nature. They believed in the four humors, that leeches cured disease, that people with ears so large they were used as capes lived in Asia, monstrous births, and numerous other things we now know to be nonsense.

For example, medieval people had completely different ideas of magic than fantasy gaming does. They had folk magic and hedge magic that replaced our understanding modern of conventional medicine, from whence comes the idea of village wise women. For that matter, the evil eye was something anyone could do, not specifically licensed wizards.

I know nobody real cares about verisimilitude, but I am really annoyed that fantasy game books depict pseudo-medieval fantasy land as a theme park set in modern day Seattle or something.

Research links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)
• https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/37q2sw/accounting_for_presentism/
• http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/fiction/2008/01/historical-fict.html
• https://mostlyhistoricalfiction.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/the-problem-of-presentism-in-historical-fiction/
• http://wordarts.blogspot.com/2014/09/historical-fiction-1-curse-of-presentism.html
• http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2008/07/smug-presentist-science-and-historical.html