Book Review: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

I received this book as a Christmas gift from a kind friend--and I'd to read Ian Mortimer's "sequel": The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England. Mortimer writes this book as guidebook to England in the fourteenth century:

 

The past is a foreign country - this is your guidebook. Imagine you could travel in time, 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.

The Contents:

Introduction: Welcome to Medieval England
1. The Landscape
2. The People
3. The Medieval Character
4. Basic Essentials
5. What to Wear
6. Travelling
7. Where to Stay
8. What to Eat and Drink
9. Health and Hygiene
10. The Law
11. What to Do
Envoi
Notes

I agree with the publisher's blurb: this is a very entertaining book, filled with detail about daily life, customs, clothing, music, religion, food and drink--so many insights into daily life. It is written as non-fiction but as if the reader is there, experiencing and learning about life in the fourteenth century for peasants, clergy, knights, lords, nobility, and monarchs.

Ian Mortimer's website is also filled with detail and information about this book and The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.