Book description
The past is a foreign country: t
his 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 guesthouse? 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 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.
BRAIN SHOTS: the byte-sized guide to a completely
different world: England in the Middle Ages
Ian Mortimer has BA and PhD degrees in history from Exeter University
and an MA in archive studies from University College London. He was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998, and was
awarded the Alexander Prize (2004) by the Royal Historical Society for
his work on the social history of medicine. He is the author of three
medieval biographies,
The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger
Mortimer,
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III
, and
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King
, published in 2003, 2006 and 2007 respectively by Jonathan Cape. He
lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor.
