This book explores the changing relationship between historical truth, fiction, and lies through a series of cases. Contrary to the postmodern skepticism that blurs the line between fictional and historical narratives in the name of the constructive element they share, the relationship between the two is seen here as a contest for the representation of reality. By digging into the texts, contrary to the intentions of those who produced them, uncontrolled voices can be brought to light: for example, those of women and men who, in witchcraft trials, escaped the stereotypes suggested by the judges. In medieval novels, we can find unintentional historical evidence of customs and traditions, isolating fragments of truth within fiction: a discovery that seems almost trivial to us today, but which sounded paradoxical when it was first explicitly formulated in Paris in the mid-17th century. Reality, imagination, and falsification contrast, intertwine, and feed off each other. Historians, Aristotle wrote, speak of what has been (the true), poets of what could have been (the possible). But the true is the point of arrival, not the point of departure. Historians (and, in a different way, poets) do something for a living that is part of everyone's life: untangling the web of truth, falsehood, and fiction that is the fabric of our existence in the world.