The website MedievalPOC, which tracks examples of people of color in premodern art, carries the subtitle “Because you wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.” The blog’s creator, Malisha Dewalt, aims “to address common misconceptions that People of Color did not exist in Europe before the Enlightenment, and to emphasize the cognitive dissonance in the way this is reflected in media produced today.”The purpose of this article is to examine that dissonance through a survey of online responses when audiences are confronted with people of color in medievalist television, and to interrogate what lies behind cries of “historical inaccuracy” when this occurs.

The invocation of whiteness as a measure of “historical accuracy” in popular media seems inconsistent given the other examples of historical license that people are willing to accept (e.g., actors speaking in modern English). Helen Young, in a study of issues of race and ethnicity in the Dragon Age games, writes that:

Likewise, Malisha Dewalt established her blog because she was frustrated at the assumption that “‘Everyone was white back then.’ And ‘back then’ was literally any time ever, or back in the good old days of Westeros.”

Behind claims of merely wishing to be true to the historical record lurk issues of racial and national identity. Young, referring to Patrick Geary’s work on national identity and the early Middle Ages,argues that concepts of nationhood are bound up with the perception of the medieval past more so than, perhaps, any other era. “From the late eighteenth century onwards, the Middle Ages has been considered the formative crucible for specific ethnic nationalisms.”