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
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
Taschenbuch
What it was really like to live in the age of Austen, Byron and Waterloo?
Covering the years from the French Revolution to the death of George IV, this immersive guide asks what it actually felt like to travel through Regency Britain. What would you wear? What would you eat? How quickly could you travel? Where would you stay, and what happened if you became ill or fell foul of the law?
Behind the thrills and frills of the Regency age lay rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, population growth and political upheaval .New roads, canals and the early railways changed travel; consumer culture reshaped homes and clothing; policing and medicine transformed public life.
Allowing us a close look at street level, Ian Mortimer combines the practical details of everyday life with the larger social changes driving them. The result is a Regency Britain that is exuberant, unequal, inventive and already much closer to the modern world than its costumes suggest.
'Excellent... Mortimer's erudition is formidable' The Times
'Ian Mortimer has made this kind of imaginative time travel his specialty' Daily Mail
Covering the years from the French Revolution to the death of George IV, this immersive guide asks what it actually felt like to travel through Regency Britain. What would you wear? What would you eat? How quickly could you travel? Where would you stay, and what happened if you became ill or fell foul of the law?
Behind the thrills and frills of the Regency age lay rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, population growth and political upheaval .New roads, canals and the early railways changed travel; consumer culture reshaped homes and clothing; policing and medicine transformed public life.
Allowing us a close look at street level, Ian Mortimer combines the practical details of everyday life with the larger social changes driving them. The result is a Regency Britain that is exuberant, unequal, inventive and already much closer to the modern world than its costumes suggest.
'Excellent... Mortimer's erudition is formidable' The Times
'Ian Mortimer has made this kind of imaginative time travel his specialty' Daily Mail