REVIEWS:
'Woolgar draws together a compelling account of the sights, sounds and smells of the Middle Ages...[a] deeply enjoyable and accessible book.' - Mark Ormrod, BBC History Magazine
'...wide-ranging and copiously illustrated...a great emptying out of file cards and interesting facts, delivered in prose that is invariably clear, precise and uncontaminated by jargon.' - Nicholas Vincent, The Tablet
'It can be difficult to bring such brief, dry records to life, but Woolgar interprets them vividly...He writes in a brisk style and provides, courtesy of the ever-generous Yale University Press, many pretty and always helpful illustrations.' -Daniel Wakelin, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
DESCRIPTION:
Crucial to an understanding of life in the past is an appreciation of how individuals perceived their world. This book seeks to recreate and explain the physical environment of the later medieval period - the sights, noises, smells, tastes and feelings - and use this to imagine the kinds of lives lived by medieval men and women. Based on a wide range of documentary and fugitive sources, from saints' lives, collections of miracles, sermons and literary works, through to domestic financial records and the remains of buildings, the book reveals a physical experience very different from our own. Popular beliefs about the senses were closely intertwined with intellectual ideas about their operation. 'Stinking sin' and the 'odour of sanctity' are vestiges of a world that thought differently, and one in which the lustre of a colour might be more important than its hue, or moral qualities might attach to sound, be it the song of angels or the cachinnation of devils. As well as examining individual senses, the book considers how sensation functioned in practice, looking in detail at the households of bishops of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, as well as those of the queens of late medieval England and the aristocracy at the end of the Middle Ages. Woolgar's deft and scrupulous text recovers an elusive and fascinating world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
C.M. Woolgar is Reader and Head of Special Collections at the University of Southampton Library. He is the author of The Great Household in Late Medieval England (1999), also published by Yale University Press.
SUBJECT CLASSIFICATIONS:
British & Irish history: c 500 to c 1000
British & Irish history: c 1000 to c 1500
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Illustrations: Illustrations (some col.)
Number of Pages: 336
Dewey: 942.03
