Imagine telling a 12th-century Norman knight that he was "French." He'd probably look at you funny, then maybe challenge you to a duel. He spoke a dialect of Old French, sure, but his loyalty was to his lord, his lineage, and possibly his cousin sitting on the English throne. "France" as we mean it today? Not really his concern.

This is the puzzle historians face daily. The categories we use to sort people—nationality, race, sexuality, even "religion"—often didn't exist, or meant something completely different, in the past. So how do we write honestly about people whose self-understanding doesn't match our vocabulary? The answer requires both detective work and a healthy dose of humility.

Here's a tempting trap: you find a Roman emperor who had male lovers, and you think, "Aha! Gay emperor!" Easy headline, easy story. The problem? The category "gay" as an identity—a kind of person you are—is roughly 150 years old. Romans certainly noticed who slept with whom, but they sorted these acts by social role and status, not by orientation. Calling Hadrian "gay" tells us more about us than about him.

The same trouble appears with race. "Whiteness" as a category was constructed gradually, mostly in the context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism. A medieval Italian merchant didn't think of himself as "white"—he thought of himself as Genoese, Christian, and not a Venetian, thank you very much. Project our racial categories backward, and you flatten a much messier reality.

Historians call this anachronism: smuggling present concepts into past contexts where they don't belong. It's not just sloppy; it actively misleads. We end up studying our own reflection in the well of history rather than the water at the bottom.

Takeaway

When you apply a modern label to a historical person, ask: did this category exist for them, and would they recognize themselves in it? If not, you're describing your own world, not theirs.

If we can't use our categories, what do we use? Historians try to reconstruct what scholars call the actor's category—how people understood themselves in their own time. This means reading sources carefully for the words people actually used, the groups they actually claimed, and the boundaries they actually drew.

Take Joan of Arc. Modern writers have called her a feminist icon, a transgender pioneer, a nationalist hero, and a religious mystic. But Joan would have recognized only the last description. She understood herself through visions, saints, and divine mission. Her wearing men's clothing wasn't a statement about gender identity—it was, in her words, practical protection and obedience to her voices. Her categories were medieval Catholic ones, not ours.

This doesn't mean we can't analyze her actions through modern lenses—comparison is useful. But we should be transparent that we're doing so, and we shouldn't pretend our analysis captures who she thought she was. The historian's first job is to listen before interpreting.

Takeaway

Before asking what a historical person means to us, ask what they meant to themselves. The gap between those two answers is where real historical understanding lives.

Even after we understand a historical identity on its own terms, we still have to write about it—usually for readers who don't share that worldview. This is translation, and like all translation, something always gets lost or twisted. The historian's job is to manage the loss honestly.

One technique is preserving original terms. Rather than calling a Byzantine official a "bureaucrat," you might use logothete and explain it. The unfamiliar word signals to the reader: this is a different world with its own categories. Another technique is careful comparison—saying something "functioned somewhat like" rather than "was" the modern equivalent. The hedge is doing important work.

The hardest cases involve people who genuinely seem to fit a modern category, even partially. A historian writing about same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence has to decide: do I use period terms like "sodomite" with their moral baggage? Modern terms with their anachronism? Some neutral description? There's no perfect answer—only choices made transparently, with the reader let in on the difficulty.

Takeaway

Good historical writing is honest about its own awkwardness. When the past resists easy translation, the resistance itself is information worth preserving.

The past is, as the saying goes, a foreign country. Historians are the translators, and like all translators, we work in the gap between two languages that never perfectly match. Our modern identity categories are powerful tools—but they're tools, not universal truths.

The next time you encounter a confident claim that some historical figure "was really" something modern, pause. Ask whose categories are doing the work. Often, the most interesting question isn't who they were, but how their world made sense of them—and how that differs from ours.