The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer sounds wonderful! Another book to add to my ever growing collection. Available from Amazon UK and Book Depository now. Will be published in the US on April 9, 2012.
Synopsis
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
We think of Queen Elizabeth I as ‘Gloriana’: the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (1558-1603) as a golden age of maritime heroes, like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, and of great writers, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? 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?
In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a prospective traveller to late sixteenth-century England would ask. Applying the groundbreaking approach he pioneered in his bestselling Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, the Elizabethan world unfolds around the reader.
He shows a society making great discoveries and winning military victories and yet at the same time being troubled by its new-found awareness. It is 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. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language and some of the most magnificent architecture, and sees Elizabeth’s subjects settle in America and circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.
Visit Ian Mortimer’s official website here.
This book sounds like it is a fascinating insight into the social history of this era. I think the more we read about how they lived on a day-to-day basis, the more we maybe able to understand their behaviour, and perhaps not judge them as harshly through our ‘modern eyes’… 🙂 Will be adding this one to my ‘library’ too. Like you my bookshelves are groaning under the weight of Tudor books, I found one in a charity shop today, for a £1, called Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy. Have looked quickly through your review list but couldn’t see it (maybe missed it), its a fictional one. I also received for Xmas, a set of three by Dixie Atkins ‘A Golden Sorrow’ about Henry’s wives, not got round to reading them yet so can’t comment on them, (the pile at the side of my bed is huge) but good, bad or indifferent I will enjoy because of the subject. Bye for now.
This book looks utterly facinating & interesting and i shall look it out as soon as possible, plus i have already added it to my ‘to-read’ list! Thank you for informing me about this increadible novel. x
Ian Mortimer has an excellent, easy-to-read writing style. I assign his Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England to my Medieval History course. If this book is anything like the Medieval Guide (which it probably is) it will be an excellent book; I cant wait to read it!