The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides)

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I notice Ian Mortimer has taken the same approach in two other books - The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England and The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain: Life in the Age of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton and The Great Fire of London. I intend to read them too. As lively as it is informative. His (Mortimer's) work of speculative social history is eminently entertaining but this doesn't detract from the seriousness and the thorough research involved Financial Times This superb "rough guide" to 14th century England takes a fresh approach to history by thinking of the past not as something simply to be studied, but as something to be lived Aimee Shalan, Guardian The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Sixteenth Century was published in 2012 by Viking Press [10]

This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling world of Victorian morality.The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England 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 everyday life 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. Obviously, A Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England was a title calculated to gain my attention. The premise: a different take on presenting an overview of a period of time, using the format of a travel guide – something of a Fodor's England 1320 that might be found in the TARDIS. Exploring the experience of all the senses, this should be a gem of a resource to the writer of historical fiction or fantasy.

People rarely bathed or did laundry but they did try to rinse their hands with water before eating. In The Time Traveller's Guide Ian Mortimer's radical new approach turns our entire understanding of history upside down. History is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived, whether that's the life of a peasant or a lord. The result is perhaps the most astonishing history book you are ever likely to read; as revolutionary as it is informative, as entertaining as it is startling. He also writes in other genres: his fourth novel 'The Outcasts of Time' won the 2018 Winston Graham Prize for historical fiction. His earlier trilogy of novels set in the 1560s were published under his middle names, James Forrester. In 2017 he wrote 'Why Running Matters' - a memoir of running in the year he turned fifty.

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Imagine a disease were to wipe out 40 percent of the modern population of the UK—more than 25 million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the benefits of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children, and your friends … You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians could blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348—whether they will die or survive—deserves your compassion. When you see women dragging their parents’ and children’s corpses into ditches, weeping and screaming—when you listen to a man who has buried all five of his sons with his own hands, and, in his distress, he tells you that there was no divine service when he did so, and that the death bell did not sound—you know that these people have entered a chasm of grief beyond description.” After The Canterbury Tales this has to be the most entertaining book ever written about the middle ages Sue Arnold, Guardian An original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages. Mortimer] 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 of this careful blend of scholarship and fancy is a jaunty journey through the 14th Century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life Guardian