The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century is a handbook about Late Medieval England by British historian Ian Mortimer. It was first published on 2 October 2008 by The Bodley Head,[1] and a later edition with more pages was released on 29 February 2012. The volume debunks and explains various myths about the period.[2]

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Front cover of the US edition, with spelling of "Traveller" modified
AuthorIan Mortimer
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SeriesTime Traveller's Guide
Subject1300s in England
GenreHistory
PublisherThe Bodley Head
Published in English
2 October 2008
Media typePrint
Pages319
ISBN0224079948
Followed byThe Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England 

The informal book is confined to the 14th century in England, with passing references to the Continent. Mortimer goes into details about food, clothing, building materials, the layout of houses, but also covers things like laws, customs, travel, entertainment.[3]

Illustrations

All the illustrations in the volume were provided by British Library.[4]

Reception

Tom Holland, writing for The Daily Telegraph, was fairly critical of the book; describing the volume as an "old-fashioned study". Holland also proposed that Mortimer felt embarrassed to write a book about what was "familiar to a reader in the 19th century".[5] Mortimer addressed Holland's criticism by implying that Holland had failed to understand the book, going as far as to call Holland's review "bizarre". In his reply, Mortimer assumed that Holland wanted the book to be "semi-fictionalised" and explained that such an approach would trivialise his work, as the volume is intended to be used by scholars, but also hoped to stand the "test of time".[6]

A review written by Kathryn Hughes for The Guardian praised the book's different approach and abundance of trivia, but echoed Holland's opinion about the stylistic choice of narration, stating it to be "awkward".[7] The Washington Post's short review by Aaron Leitko vaunted the book as "Fodor's-style framework" and a travel book that gets into "heart of a different time zone".[8]

Sequels

The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Sixteenth Century was published in 2012 by Viking Press[9] and The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain: Life in the Age of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton and The Great Fire of London by The Bodley Head in 2017.[10]

Various big YouTube historians—such as Raffaello Urbani ("Metatron")[11] and Skallagrim Nilsson—have produced videos about the book and endorsed it.[12]

gollark: You could probably use non-youtube video hosting, but it would be annoying and hard to monetize.
gollark: I would assume making the images out of them takes some work, unless there's a convenient script for that.
gollark: Do you just spend ages manually compiling these big collages of comemnts?
gollark: Hmm. Very annoying of YouTube, that.
gollark: We contain carbon-14 and potassium-40 or something.

References
  1. "The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England". www.goodreads.com.
  2. Mortimer, Ian (29 February 2012). "The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century". Google Books. Random House.
  3. "Review: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England". Magic Writer.
  4. Mortimer, Ian. The time traveller's guide to medieval England : a handbook for visitors to the fourteenth century. Bodley Head. p. 318. ISBN 1448103789.
  5. Holland, Tom (10 October 2008). "Review: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer". The Daily Telegraph.
  6. "Ian Mortimer: What was new in 2008?". www.ianmortimer.com.
  7. Hughes, Kathryn (24 October 2008). "Plague ahoy". The Guardian.
  8. Leitko, Aaron (14 February 2010). "Book review: 'The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England' by Ian Mortimer". The Washington Post. Retrieved 25 November 2018.
  9. Mortimer, Ian (1 March 2012). "The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England". Google Books. Random House.
  10. Mortimer, Ian (6 April 2017). "The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain: Life in the Age of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton and The Great Fire of London". Google Books. Random House.
  11. "Medieval Towns, Houses, Population And Life Expectancy". YouTube. Retrieved 23 October 2017.
  12. "Being a Time Traveler in the Middle Ages - Probably Sucks!". YouTube. Retrieved 30 November 2017.
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