Imagine you could travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see, and hear, and smell? Where would you stay? What are you going to eat? And how are you going to test to see if you are going down with the plague? History is not just about battles and dates, it is also about how our ancestors used to live, whether a peasant or a lord.
The Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer (hardback Bodley Head, 2012)
We typically think of the Elizabethan period in terms of Queen Elizabeth I as 'Gloriana', a golden age of maritime heroes, and of great writers but it is also a country in which life expectancy at birth is in the
early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are
persecuted for their faith. This book focuses on such questions as: If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London
in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you
wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if
so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence,
sexism and famine of the time?
These provide a fascinating look at social history.
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These provide a fascinating look at social history.
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