Empathetic fiction is essential yet insufficient for understanding a persecuted minority’s inner world.

Evidence

It is just as possible for a good writer, by the exercise of empathy and imagination, to find adequate literary expression for the state of mind of a persecuted Morisco as it is for a male author to render the state of mind of a woman (or vice versa), or for a white writer to convey life as seen through the eyes of blacks (again, or vice versa). This Moorish genre within the literature of the Christian majority deserves, demands, our attention, not just because some of the stories and verses may have been created by Moriscos themselves (although I would not exclude that possibility in some cases), but because these literary creations of the sixteenth century force us, as readers, to begin to enter imaginatively into the life the Moriscos lived. To rely exclusively on imaginative fictional constructions would be dangerous, and such conclusions as we may draw from such sources need to be checked constantly against information available from less dubious texts, but without “literary” assistance we will be hard put to know a world so different from our own as what we find reflected in the Moriscos’ own writings. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 961

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely nuanced methodological point about the historian’s relationship to fiction: empathy-as-tool, checked against hard texts, for entering worlds otherwise unreachable. Resists summary; worth sitting with.