Note before I begin: Two things always seem to happen to me when I visit Las Vegas: 1) My baggage arrives on a different plane than I do, and 2) I end up borrowing a computer that causes strange formatting issues on my blog. The first is resolved now, but the 2nd I’m not so sure about. If this post is difficult to read, my apologies, and if need be I’ll try to fix it when I get home.
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Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1999)
Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, Jeffery L. Singman and Will McLean (Greenwood Press, 1995)
Daily Life in Elizabethan England, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1995)
Summary: These are some of the better history books I’ve seen. They may or may not be what you are looking for, but if you are interested in the topics they cover, I think they do a great job. I can’t say there was never a single sentence that made me pause and go ‘hmmn’, but I don’t have any of the reservations I have about other very helpful but still flawed works on the same era.
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The SuperHusband brought two of these three home from our local library for me last fall. I was skeptical (judging the book by the cover and all that), but eventually boredom got the best of me and I cracked one open. Pleasant surprise. [The three are part of a larger series, but I haven’t read any of the other titles in the series, which are by other authors.] I made myself read the entirety of Medieval Europe last fall so that I could write a proper review; I think I read all of Elizabethan as well, or at least the bulk of it; Chaucer’s England I picked up the a few weeks ago when I went to fetch the others in order to prepare this post, and have skimmed it to see what’s there, but have only read snatches of it in any detail. I lump them together because they are all by the same author, and are very similar to each other in the kinds of information and comments they contain, and are all of similarly good quality.
As the titles indicate, these books deal with what ordinary life was like in the indicated time periods; if you want detailed accounts of kings, bishops, and battles, you’ll need to find some other book – though these do each open with a brief overview the history of the period, to help put the bulk of the book into context. In contrast, if you always wanted to know about how much it would cost* to buy a quart of ale in 16th century England, or maybe you have some spare honeycombs sitting around and were looking for a nice medieval mead recipe to use them up, these books can help.
The goal of the series is to provide an entry-level to intermediate resource, but which is more substantial than most beginner’s histories. At this is fully succeeds. Something like this would be a good choice before trying to get into A Day in a Medieval City (which I reviewed last month). The reading level is adult, but not overwhelmingly complex or technical – a high school student shouldn’t have any difficulty with the books, and would probably really enjoy picking one out to read as part of a European History course.
I expect that younger students who are strong readers and highly interested in the subject would also find them accessible, and it is fairly easy to skip to the sections of high interest for those who don’t want to read the whole book. That said, parental guidance is always recommended – I can’t recall anything particularly objectionable, but I’m fairly sure I ran across some adultish topics, though if your children are already immersed in contemporary American pop culture (mine are not) I bet you’ll never bat an eyelash. If nothing else the discussion of religion is one where parents may want to provide some perspective.
What I really love about these books is the respect with which they describe and speculate about the people living in medieval and renaissance Europe. The author comes from a living-history background, and I think this really shows through – people of the past are treated as ordinary people quite like ourselves. The three d’s of the gossip-method history writing – dumb, depraved, and disgusting – are refreshingly absent, and without succumbing to the opposite error of combining nostalgia and amnesia to gloss over the difficult realities of the time period.
Another strength is the avoidance of gross generalizations. Medieval Europe, the title most likely to succumb to that temptation, limits itself to the high middle ages – approximately 1100 to 1300 – and to northwestern Europe. In each of the chapters devoted to village, city, monastic and castle life, a specific location (one for which ample documentation is available) is chosen and examined in detail. Rather than pretending that you could possibly explain two hundred years and four countries worth of monastic life in a single chapter, for example, the book gives you a detailed look inside Cluny, thus giving you a general idea of what a monk’s life might have been by showing just how it was in that particular time and place.
All three books are geared towards helping the re-creationist get started. There are specific instructions for making clothing, as well period songs with sheet music, descriptions of how to play period games, specific recipes culled from historical sources, and so forth. For that reason these books would make an excellent resource for planning a themed party, educational event, or costuming and set ideas for a play (or story) set in the relevant era. Obviously Chaucer’s England is just begging to be read by anyone studying The Cantebury Tales, and Elizabethan England would likewise be a natural accompaniment to a study of Shakespeare.
Some differences between Medieval Europe and Chaucer’s England, in case you are wondering which title will better fit your needs: As I mentioned above, the former covers the period from 1100 to 1300, whereas the latter focuses on the second half of the 14thcentury. Also, as one could guess from the titles, Europe covers a slightly broader geographic era than England. In addition to the study of Cluny, the chapter on town life uses Paris (mining the data from the 1292 tax assessments for evidence) as its sample city. The sections on castle and village life are based on locations in England. Chaucer’s England leans very strongly in the direction of aid to the aspiring re-creationist; it lacks these detailed studies of archeological sites as found in Medieval Europe, but seems to have more material on clothing, music, games, and so forth.
*Answer: about a half-penny.