Synopsis: 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?
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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?
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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.
By Ian Mortimer
The Bodley Head, 2008
ISBN: 9780224079945
Synopsis: 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.
Click here to read our Interview with Ian Mortimer
Listen to Podcasts from the author on the publisher’s website
Go to Ian Mortimer’s own website, with articles about the book
Review of this book from the Daily Telegraph
Article about the book from the Financial Times
Review by Rachel Bellerby
Review by Lady Despenser
Review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian
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