I need to buy this book; I read it cover to cover a year ago and just borrowed it again for reference.

Any book that tries to sum up "medieval times" for a popular audience is going to do a lot of simplifying, but this one does a pretty good job as far as I, who am Not A Historian, can tell. It's a work of popular history and a bit older but makes extensive use of primary documents and, gratifyingly, tackles towns and villages as well as castle life.

The illustrations were added after the fact for this hardcover compilation, but they're for the most part carefully selected from medieval Books of Hours and other manuscripts - only a scattering of irrelevant Victorian illustrations.

If you're reading this review, you MAY be a writer (or artist, tabletop gamer, reenactor, etc.) Another work I recommend is Daily Life in the Middle Ages by Paul B. Newman, which was fabulous for small details of material culture. And Dorothy Hartley's Lost Country Life is quirky and dated but has a lot of good stuff about the rhythms of agricultural life.

Now if only there were more accessible books out there on non-Western material culture / social history. Heck, even coverage of eastern Europe is lacking in English. I try to create fantasy worlds that break the medieval mold, but I keep coming back to medieval/early modern Western Europe, and especially Britain, simply because of my confidence with my ability to handle the source material. Sigh. ( )

My Medieval Bible ( )