The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:1st Oct '09
Should be back in stock very soon
An original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages.
What to eat and wear, fear and enjoy in medieval England
Suppose you could actually visit medieval England. Where would you sleep? What would you eat? What should you wear? And how would you know whether you were falling ill with the plague?
Ian Mortimer turns social history into a practical guide for the imaginary traveller. Drawing on chronicles, legal records, household inventories, medical writing and literature, he reconstructs the sights, sounds, smells and assumptions of fourteenth-century life.
The result overturns the familiar picture of a uniformly filthy, static and backward Middle Ages. England emerges as a varied society of towns and markets, changing fashions, difficult journeys, religious devotion, social mobility, violence and humour. Mortimer guides readers through housing, food, health, law, clothing, work and entertainment while explaining the ideas and rules that made this world intelligible to the people living in it.
‘Ian Mortimer is the most remarkable medieval historian of our time’ The Times
‘After The Canterbury Tales this has to be the most entertaining book ever written about the middle ages’ Guardian
Superbly lively and filled with telling anecdote. * The Big Issue in the North *
Amazing * Alison Weir *
He has a novelist's eye for detail, and his portrait of an England in which sheep are the size of dogs, 30-year-old women are regarded as so much "winter forage", and green vegetables widely held to be poisonous has something of the hallucinatory quality of science-fiction * Daily Telegraph *
[Mortimer] sets out to re-enchant the 14th Century, taking us by the hand through a landscape furnished with jousting knights, revolting peasants and beautiful ladies in wimples. It is Monty Python and the Holy Grail with footnotes, and, my goodness it is fun... The result of this careful blend of scholarship and fancy is a jaunty journey through the 14th Century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life * Guardian *
This is not only an unusual book, but a thoroughly engaging one * Literary Review *
After The Canterbury Tales this has to be the most entertaining book ever written about the middle ages * Guardian *
Addressing the reader directly, his aim, triumphantly achieved, is to engage our sympathies with people whose similarities to us are as fascinating as their lives * Sunday Telegraph *
Entertaining, informative and fun * Daily Express *
Ian Mortimer is taking readers on a sense-smacking tour of the 14th century, which is guaranteed to make us wrinkle our noses in disgust and delight by turns * Daily Mail *
Successfully communicating the extraordinary energy of this vibrant, cathedral-building time * Sunday Herald *
ISBN: 9781845950996
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 24mm
Weight: 272g
352 pages