Positively Medieval

For those of you who have been following this blog, it's now a book!  I've taken the best bits of the blog and organized them into a social history of the Middle Ages, everything from medieval farm animals, to marriage and divorce, to brothels, to the medieval diet, to life as a medieval teenager.

The book is called "Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages."  It's a big one, something like 400 pages.  It's available as an ebook on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and iTunes;  a paperback version is also for sale on Amazon and is coming soon to a store near you.

Here's the link to the book on the US Amazon site.

 And here's the Preface, to give you a taste:

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What was life like in the Middle Ages?  It’s a fascinating historical period, where to the modern reader everything can seem larger than life, more dramatic, much more interesting than a modern life centered on driving to work, paying the bills, picking up something at the grocery store, and urging the kids to do their homework.  Between The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, almost everyone has become interested in the Middle Ages.

But it was more than a time of sword fights and capes and dramatic contests for the crown.  It was also the period when much of what we think of as “modern” was first established, from universities to the legal profession to sword-and-sorcery stories to parish churches to Europe’s political and linguistic boundaries.

Four years ago I started a blog to inform those interested of aspects of medieval life.  I wanted to counter common misconceptions, such as that medieval people were all brutal and superstitious, or that everyone lived under “feudalism,” or that medieval women had no rights, or that everyone was middle-aged.  I also wanted to give a little more context than those who arrived at my blog after a Google search probably expected—no simple answers here to questions like, “How many silver coins make a gold coin?” or “What was a queen’s illegitimate child called?”  (I actually don’t have handy answers to either of those.)

In this book I’ve pulled together a lot of the ideas from the blog with the hope that both those who have been reading it and those who have not will discover some of the fascination that has kept me involved with medieval history my entire adult life.  There is a little political history, the “kings and battles” kind of history that they may have tried to make you memorize at some point.  But most of it is social history, how people lived and tried to get along.

The book is arranged topically.  Under broad headings, you will find out about medieval society in general, how people lived their lives, as well as more specific information about everything from farming to the church.  Because every chapter cannot possibly cover a thousand-year span, I tend to focus primarily on the high Middle Ages, the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, although you will also find plenty here on both the early and late Middle Ages.  This isn’t a textbook—it doesn’t have to be read in any particular order, and there won’t be a quiz on Monday.  So plunge in, and I hope you enjoy it!

© C. Dale Brittain 2018