How do historians tell apart antique media that embodied mainstream sensibilities from kitsch and novelties?
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It can be very difficult. Generally it is judgement, based on study of other sources which gives context on what was considered “mainstream”. This is fairly easy for periods of time that we have a lot of documentation about, but for periods where we just have tiny scraps of knowledge, it is basically impossible to know how to interpret the context of a document.
Beyond sarcasm and humor, it can also be very hard to tell if ancient documents are straight out lies. For instance, in Ancient Rome, the standards for “history” are very different from modern ones, and making up interesting stories was considered acceptable in some cases. In the middle ages, scholarly thought worked very differently, and you had monks writing long papers on subjects they had no practical experience with, such as farming or astronomy. These documents are filled with errors, and it is hard to know if everyone was that clueless at the time, or if the document just represented one monk’s kooky ideas which no one ever read.
Also, remember that mainstream ideas are not necessarily true ideas. History is written by the victor. Chances are the most popular and well documented history of a king’s reign was written based on the politics after they died, rather than what their reign was actually like. The same is true for wars, the official history will come fron the victors, not the losers or some impartial third party.
Anyway, your question is exactly the sort of thing that historians argue about all the time
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