Ha, history

Sometimes I wonder what people who lived in the past that we learn about in the present would have thought of us studying them. We talk about historical events, the past, sometimes with absolutely sweeping, generalized terms: the Renaissance a reflowering of art and the beginning of the skepticism and all that. I wonder what the average person would have imagined of us, studying them. Are we mis-representing the peasantry of the Middle Ages? Since they were more or less all illiterate, it's not as if they could pick up a pen and write a letter to the future.