Creating the setting, part 5: The Middle Ages is a foreign country

In part 4, I gave three options for the best real world analogy to the generic fantasy setting. Of these, generic fantasy adventures sometimes seem to take place in the first, sometimes the last, but almost never in the second. That is, although they're called "medieval," they actually carefully avoid being medieval. Why? I suppose the answer is that fantasy is imaginary, so it doesn't exist unless people are able to imagine it. Fantasy elements that aren't easy to understand, that don't feel natural to modern minds, don't get passed on. And modern people really can't understand the mindset of the Middle Ages.

We can imagine the Early Modern Period because it wasn't that long ago. Likewise, even though it was a long time ago, Roman antiquity, with its senators and milestones and public works projects, seems strangely familiar. The Dark Age is just the post-apocalyptic scenario of antiquity. Barbarian hordes are the period-appropriate equivalent of zombie hordes. Mad Max, The Road, and The Book of Eli are all essentially retellings of the downfall of the Roman Peace, or at least how we imagine it. (I suppose that's why the unlikely re-emergence of Christianity plays such a large role in post-apocalyptic fiction, since the Dark Ages was the period in which Christianity became dominant in the first place.)

The real Middle Ages, on the other hand, was a completely different society, with its own strange rules, beliefs, and assumptions. It's been said that the future is a foreign country. This must be true of the past, too. And it's hard to get together with a bunch of buddies and role-play life in a foreign country. How much does the average American really know about Egypt or Indonesia? That's why people travel.

I suppose this is why attempts to make "historically accurate" fantasy fail so bad. There never was any single historical period which fantasy was intended to reproduce. Introducing real elements of real medieval life (like prices and city life) only ends up making the vision more cumbersome and unnatural.