Author: Ian Mortimer
Title: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Publication Info: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2011. [Originally published, 2008]
Summary/Review:
The book is written tongue-in-cheek as a guidebook of what one would find should they travel through time to 14th-century England. Mortimer is particularly concerned with debunking popular myths and stereotypes of medieval times. Tidbits include a breakdown of fashion, with the caveat that clothing styles changed rapidly over the course of the century (with an emphasis on men’s clothing showing off the form of the body). Traveling about the country is a challenge since people didn’t use maps and relied on spoken instructions of what road to follow. The diet of a peasant may have actually been healthier than that for the working people of our day. And while the Bubonic Plague is the most fearsome disease of the century, the people were also tormented by many other diseases, including leprosy. This book is a fun, popular introduction to understanding everyday life in medieval England.
Recommended books:
- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
- Memoirs Of A Medieval Woman: The Life And Times Of Margery Kempe by Louise Collis
- Life in a Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Gies
- Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages by Frances Gies
- Black Death by Philip Ziegler
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Rating: ****
Panorama of the Mountains 