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Loading... The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to… (2008)by Ian Mortimer
  
No current Talk conversations about this book. Includes bibliographical references and index.  TorontoOratorySPN | Aug 31, 2022 |  This was really fun! It's a history of medieval (specifically, 1300s) England, but written in a very engaging present-tense style. It also focuses on a number of different aspects of everyday life: there are chapters, for instance, on "what to wear," "where to stay," "what to eat and drink," and "what to do." And, honestly, it was just a lot of fun. I learned a lot of legitimately interesting information that I'd had no reason to know of earlier (for instance, how the legal system worked, or what medicine looked like), as well as a lot of enjoyable trivia. Some of my favorites that I can remember off the top of my head: - There weren't yet any grey squirrels in England, just red ones. - Accused criminals could claim the "privilege of clergy" in court. If they were judged to be "clergy" (which was judged by determining if they could read a passage from the Bible), they couldn't be sentenced to death. - Carrots hadn't yet been bred into edible vegetables. - Though most people didn't fully bathe often, it was seen as very important to keep one's hands and face clean. - Monks in urban monasteries had shorter life expectancies than people who lived outside monasteries (due to disease outbreaks). I am definitely adding the other books in this series to my TBR! (  ) forsanolim | May 18, 2022 | Entertaining take on history: what you'll see, what you'd do if suddenly transported in time. (  ) jennybeast | Apr 14, 2022 | This book was super interesting and informative if you’re looking to understand what life was like back in 14th century England. Plenty of statistics, but also the author worked hard to tell about life in an interesting narrative way that kept things from getting too dry. I found all the little tidbits about trade and buildings and the daily life of an Englishman very informative as well as statistics about percentages of the population that was literate, what sort of life you could expect if you were born into a household that worked for a landowner, etc. 5/5 stars. ( ) KatKinney | Mar 3, 2022 | Life in medieval times was a lot different. I think I prefer reading about to living it! (  ) Nefersw | Jan 14, 2022 |
 The pleasure of reading Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" is its Fodor's-style framework. "A travel book about a past age allows us to see its inhabitants in a sympathetic way," writes Mortimer, "not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or household income but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time."  Ian Mortimer doesn't hold with any fancy notion about the past being impossible to know. Not for him the postmodern practice of confining historical discussions to the sources and letting "once upon a time" take care of itself. What Mortimer wants is living history, loud and close. In The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England he 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 is a book that, like his biography of Henry IV, fascinates and frustrates in equal measure. By far the best sections are those in which Mortimer stays truest to his conceit, and writes as though his ideal readers really are time-travellers, peeping out through the doors of their Tardis at a world which unsettlingly mixes the familiar and the bizarre. 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. Belongs to Series
A time machine has just transported you back to the fourteenth century. What do you see? How do you dress? Where will you stay? How do you earn a living and how much are you paid? What sort of food will you be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord? This is not your typical look at a historical period. This radical new approach shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. All facets of the everyday lives of serf, merchant, and aristocrat in this fascinating period are revealed, from the horrors of the plague and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and medieval haute couture.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)942.03 — History and Geography Europe England and Wales England Plantagenet 1154-1399LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.04)
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