Product Description

The past is a foreign country. This is your guidebook. Imagine you could get into a time machine and travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? Should you go to a castle or a monastic guest house? And what are you going to eat? What sort of food are you going to be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord? This radical new approach turns our entire understanding of history upside down. It shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. It sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you, the reader, to the middle ages, and showing you everything from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture.Being a guidebook, many questions are answered which do not normally occur in traditional history books. How do you greet people in the street? What should you use for toilet paper? How fast - and how safely - can you travel? Why might a physician want to taste your blood? And how do you test to see if you are going down with the plague? The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: revolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail, and startling for its portrayal of humanity in an age of violence, exuberance and fear.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29984 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 341 pages

Review
'a jaunty journey through the 14th Century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life'
--Guardian

Review
'It is Monty Python and the Holy Grail with footnotes, and, my goodness it is fun'

Review
It is written in the manner of an extremely well-informed but chatty guidebook...This is not only an unusual book, but a thoroughly engaging one

Customer Reviews

An Essential Guidebook for the Medieval Time Traveller!
I think that I can safely speak for many of us in the historical community (both writers and readers) when I say that we are - in the nicest way of course - rather nosy. That is, we want to know all about people from different times: what they looked like; what they did; how they did it. For instance, have you ever wondered whether people in the fourteenth century wore nightdresses or what the well off used to wipe their behinds with (I have!)? How about their pastimes, sense of humour or the difficulties of travelling?

Ian Mortimer's latest book: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England - A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century certainly satisfies that craving for knowledge of the minutiae of daily life in the Middle Ages. The book is lovingly researched and well written with a light sprinkling of humour that makes it very easy to read. The style in itself is very original for a non-fiction historical book, using a `guidebook' approach that is a million miles away from the stuffiness of many `academic' books. Yet, happily, the book does not suffer from a lack of sincerity or historical integrity in any way.

The topics cover a broad range of subjects for the `traveller' from what the landscape will look like to what to wear, where to stay when travelling, and how to address different kinds of people that you will meet along the way. And then, of course, when they invite you to eat with them, you will know what food to expect. And then, of course, there is always the danger of falling ill. The Time Traveller's Guide is once again at hand to tell you not only what may be wrong with you (hopefully not the plague, or leprosy!) and what medicine is available to help cure it.

This book, then, is a wonderful read. To be fair, I could not find fault either with the style or the information it offered (much to my frustration - as I always like to find at least a little criticism to balance things). To anyone who loves this period it will open up new doors to understanding the social history of the time. For writers of Medieval fiction, it is a valuable sourcebook - full of the little details that we need to make our stories come alive.

So yes, I heartily recommend this book as worth every penny

Totally engaging
Having read 'The Perfect King' and become interested in the 14th Century (previously my passion was the Tudor Age)I decided to expand my knowledge of the period by picking out this book purely by chance. It is absolutely rivetting and I completed it in just 2 days. There are so many books on the period, most as dry as dust, but the world comes alive through Mortimer's pen. I do not feel it was 'dumbing down' in any way by writing this as a 'guide book' - quite the contrary. The world truly came alive from page one, and my attention was hooked. Mortimer reaches across the centuries into the hearts and minds of people not so very different from ourselves. We learn about their working lives and their leisure. We find out what they eat and what they wear. We can almost feel the horror of parents as they can only stand and watch their whole families being wiped out by plague. The greatest writers of the period are mentioned, not just Chaucer but other authors such as the Gawain poet, writing such poignant verses with emotions that feel just as relevant today. Not only is it a rivetting read, it is truly a handbook to be read in conjuction with other history books of the period. The past is not something long-dead and buried, but has a life all its own and is why we are who we are. A very easy, fascinating read.

Simply superb
At school I hated history mainly because it was learning boring dates and events.
This book changes all of that; it tells me what I wanted to know in an easy to read and extremely enjoyable way.

What will I see in a 14th Century street, who will I see, what des it smell like, what will I eat, how do I address people I meet? All of this and more is covered in this excellent book. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the period such as the city, the town, the village etc. Very clear and very informative; ideal for casual interest, school pupils, university history reading and so on.

I won't go into the details because that would simply spoil things for you so I suggest you get this book and be transported back some 700 years.

It simply brings history to life.