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Ian Mortimer

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides) Paperback – 1 Oct. 2009

by Ian Mortimer (Author)

1,894 ratings

Book 1 of 4: Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides

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Discover an original, entertaining and illuminating guide to a completely different world: England in the Middle Ages.

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?

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.

'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

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

1 Oct. 2009
Reading age

Baby and up
Dimensions

12.7 x 2.44 x 19.81 cm
ISBN-10

1845950992
ISBN-13

978-1845950996
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From the Publisher

The Time Traveller's Guides Ian Mortimer

Product description

Review

Superbly lively and filled with telling anecdote. ― The Big Issue in the North

Amazing ― Alison Weir

He has a novelist's eye for detail, and his portrait of an England in which sheep are the size of dogs, 30-year-old women are regarded as so much "winter forage", and green vegetables widely held to be poisonous has something of the hallucinatory quality of science-fiction ― Daily Telegraph

[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

This is not only an unusual book, but a thoroughly engaging one ― Literary Review

About the Author

Dr Ian Mortimer is the Sunday Times bestselling author of TheTime Traveller's Guides to Medieval England, Elizabethan England, Restoration Britain and Regency Britain as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies, and numerous scholarly books and articles on subjects ranging in date from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998 and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2015. His work on the social history of medicine won the Alexander Prize in 2004 and was published by the Royal Historical Society in 2009. He lives in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 18th Impression edition (1 Oct. 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1845950992
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1845950996
Reading age ‏ : ‎ Baby and up
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 2.44 x 19.81 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 33,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 4 in History of English Civil War
- 7 in History of the Black Death
- 14 in Anglo-Saxon History

Customer reviews:
1,894 ratings

About the author

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Ian Mortimer

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Dr Ian Mortimer has been described by The Times newspaper as 'the most remarkable medieval historian of our time'. He is best known as the author of The Time Traveller's Guides: to Medieval England (2008); to Elizabethan England (2012); to Restoration Britain (2017); and to Regency Britain (2020). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and has published research in academic journals touching on every century from the twelfth to the twentieth.

He also writes in other genres. His latest novel, 'The Outcasts of Time', which takes place across the years 1348-1942, won the 2019 Winston Graham Prize for historical fiction. His first three novels, the Clarenceux Trilogy, set in the 1560s, appeared under his middle names, 'James Forrester'. In the year he turned fifty he wrote a memoir about the meaning of running, Why Running Matters (published in 2019).

He lives on the northeast of Dartmoor, in the southwest of England. For more information, see www.ianmortimer.com

Customer reviews

5 star		66%
4 star		22%
3 star		8%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

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scott savage

what they looked like; what they did

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 December 2016

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I think that I can safely speak for many of us in the historical community (both writers and readers) when I say that we are - in the nicest way of course - rather nosy. That is, we want to know all about people from different times: what they looked like; what they did; how they did it. For instance, have you ever wondered whether people in the fourteenth century wore nightdresses or what the well off used to wipe their behinds with (I have!)? How about their pastimes, sense of humour or the difficulties of travelling?

Ian Mortimer's latest book: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England - A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century certainly satisfies that craving for knowledge of the minutiae of daily life in the Middle Ages. The book is lovingly researched and well written with a light sprinkling of humour that makes it very easy to read. The style in itself is very original for a non-fiction historical book, using a `guidebook' approach that is a million miles away from the stuffiness of many `academic' books. Yet, happily, the book does not suffer from a lack of sincerity or historical integrity in any way.

The topics cover a broad range of subjects for the `traveller' from what the landscape will look like to what to wear, where to stay when travelling, and how to address different kinds of people that you will meet along the way. And then, of course, when they invite you to eat with them, you will know what food to expect. And then, of course, there is always the danger of falling ill. The Time Traveller's Guide is once again at hand to tell you not only what may be wrong with you (hopefully not the plague, or leprosy!) and what medicine is available to help cure it.

71 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robert Tostevin

Evocative, informative, smooth prose from an expert on Medieval history.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 January 2018

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Wonderfully evocative, informative, smooth prose from an expert on Medieval history.

He paints pictures that will inform, impress and stay with you. An example from the opening chapter...
“A Summer morning ... a servant opens an upstairs shutter and starts beating a blanket. A dog guarding a traveller’s packhorses starts barking. Nearby traders call out from their market stalls while two women stand chatting, one shielding her eyes from the sun, the other with a basket in her arms. The wooden beams of houses project out over the street. Painted signs above the doors show what is on sale in the shops beneath. Suddenly a thief grabs a merchant’s purse near the traders’ stalls, and the merchant runs after him, shouting. Everyone turns to watch. And you, in the middle of all this...”

Topics covered include …
Landscape :City; Town; Countryside; Population Statistics
People : social classes (the 3 estates) ; characteristics;
Medieval Character: mindset; world view;
Essentials: Language; Telling the Time; Wages & Income by various tradesmen & classes ; Shopping; Manners;
What to Wear :
Travelling : Roads, Sea, Ships
Where to Stay :
What to eat & Drink :
Health & Hygiene :
The Law :
What to Do :

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Revisit my younger years

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 August 2019

Verified Purchase

I’ve recently ( since retirement) been able to find time to reactivate many interests that had been forgotten. One of them is an interest in Medieval England. I loved this period as a teenager into my early 20’s but gradually ‘life’ took over. Now I can indulge myself & revisit the era. This book was recommended by someone on the Elizabeth Chadwick reader site so I snapped up a copy. I’ve only read about half of it but I love the way the author phrases some of his sentences so that you can picture the scene in front of you.

11 people found this helpful

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Calico

Mostly very interesting facts, but the concept is largely wasted

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 February 2019

Verified Purchase

The content and focus of the book are very interesting, and it is largely well-written. The tone is not as light or funny as it thinks it is, and occasionally devotes a lot of time to quite dull lists (contemporary evidence) which I skipped through. Footnotes are about 30% interesting additions/asides and 70% simply referring to sources. The 'travel guide' schtick gets a bit strained, and could/should have been more Lonely Planet than dusty journal, but it is sufficiently interesting even when jokes fall flat or the author tries yet again to make you appreciate what a marvellous idea it is to imagine history as if you were there (as if this has never been done before). My Kindle for Amazon book puts all the illustrations at the end, and would not let me zoom in on my phone (I had no idea they were included, and would have been much more interested to see them in the text or at least as a bookmark when they were being mentioned/described in the chapters). A few more illustrations wouldn't go amiss either; bulky texts and explanatory pictures are not either/or and it does not diminish a serious work by making it more interesting to read! But over-all I did enjoy the book and obvious research put into it, and may try another in the series.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

M Bowden

A fresh and enlightening view on the past

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2019

Verified Purchase

I like this book. It is a great idea and it is well executed. For me, it has the cosy familiarity of the pictures painted by favourite childhood historical novels from the Oxford Children's Library, but it is also informed by modern scholarship and has some new and surprising ideas. The author touches on archaeological evidence but he could have done more with it - the vast majority of sources quoted are historical rather than archaeological - but perhaps the new archaeological research into medieval castles, elite landscapes, etc, came too late for this book. I thought there were a few questionable ideas: dispersed settlement patterns were not confined to the 'remote regions' but could be found in many parts of England; a sailor crossing the Bay of Biscay (in any period) would have been more worried about being driven onto the rocks of its lee shore than being swept out into the Atlantic, which is both less likely and less dangerous; 13th-century great halls may have been generally smaller than 14th-century ones but why should they have been 'gloomier'? But these are mere details. The wonderful thing about this book is the author's approach to the past as a living community, populated by people whose lives are very different from ours but who are sufficiently like us to be understood and to be worth understanding - people who we should not judge but with whom we can feel a sense of common humanity.

3 people found this helpful

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