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Laddar... The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to… (urspr publ 2008; utgåvan 2011)av Ian Mortimer (Författare)
VerkdetaljerThe Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century av Ian Mortimer (2008)
  
 The pleasure of reading Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" is its Fodor's-style framework. "A travel book about a past age allows us to see its inhabitants in a sympathetic way," writes Mortimer, "not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or household income but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time."  Ian Mortimer doesn't hold with any fancy notion about the past being impossible to know. Not for him the postmodern practice of confining historical discussions to the sources and letting "once upon a time" take care of itself. What Mortimer wants is living history, loud and close. In The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England he 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 is a book that, like his biography of Henry IV, fascinates and frustrates in equal measure. By far the best sections are those in which Mortimer stays truest to his conceit, and writes as though his ideal readers really are time-travellers, peeping out through the doors of their Tardis at a world which unsettlingly mixes the familiar and the bizarre. 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. Ingår i serien
A time machine has just transported you back to the fourteenth century. What do you see? How do you dress? Where will you stay? How do you earn a living and how much are you paid? What sort of food will you be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord? This is not your typical look at a historical period. This radical new approach shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. All facets of the everyday lives of serf, merchant, and aristocrat in this fascinating period are revealed, from the horrors of the plague and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and medieval haute couture.--From publisher description. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
 Google Books — Laddar...Populära omslagBetygMedelbetyg: (4.05)
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Inget fel på detta: i princip blir det en skildring av den lilla historien med en del nya frågor samt en del lite udda rubriker: det handlar fortfarande om medeltida geografiskt tänkande, lag och rätt, nöjen, kläder och hygien. Bland annat. Det är nöjsamt skrivet, ibland överraskande, för det mesta i linje med vad man redan kan tänkas veta. Om man inte känner till trettonhundratalets (som är det som fokuseras mest på, med visst material hämtat från senare tid om källorna är bättre) engelska politiska historia kommer en del meningar gå en något över huvudet, men inte så farligt att det bör avhålla en från läsning.
Jag vet inte om jag skulle nappa på ett erbjudande om en turistresa till den skildrade tiden (definitivt inte om inte en returresa ingick, ej heller utan skydd mot böldpest), men nu kanske jag är något bättre förberedd i alla fall. (