The Barbarism of Yesteryear

One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating to our contemporary selves what life felt like in the distant past. The philosophical notion of phenomenology was an attempt to understand previous eras on their own terms, instead of imposing our present mores onto them. This would suggest that the best way to get a sense of the past would be to read first-hand accounts from various periods, which might provide a sense of their prevailing zeitgeists.