The power of story to find history's lost voices - starting with Pompeii

"Put simply, critical fabulation is the practice of using evidence to speculate about historical events for which we have few written records. Coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman in her 2008 essay " Venus in Two Acts," which confronts the impossibility of truly understanding the lives of enslaved Black women in the U.S. with things like personal diaries and official documents alone, the methodology helps uncover the voices of people whom history has rendered voiceless."

""The strength of this approach," Venner writes in her introduction, "lies in its refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends. Instead, it regards absence as a productive space, one in which we can explore historically grounded possibilities, and reconstruct plausible scenarios using our common sense as fellow human beings, rather than simply acknowledging the loss.""

""allows the historian to restore complexity, agency, and emotional depth to those who were histor"

A memory of being sold and abandoned in Pompeii illustrates how lost lives can be approached through evidence-based speculation. The Lost Voices of Pompeii follows seven historical figures in the hours before the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius, using a method described as critical fabulation. Critical fabulation relies on evidence to speculate about events with few written records, treating gaps as productive space rather than dead ends. The approach aims to restore complexity, agency, and emotional depth to people whose voices were erased by history. It also helps dispel common myths about Pompeii and its inhabitants by grounding reconstructions in historically grounded possibilities and common sense.

Read at Big Think