Modishly Tudor reading: "The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England" by Ian Mortimer

I have committed that most heinous of book blog crimes: to get two books behind, a.k.a not writing the review of one book before finishing the next. So expect cheapskate, two-for-the-price-of-one, abbreviated posts for this book and the next. 

Actually, it won't be that complicated, because both books are sequels, even remakes, of books that came before, and have featured in these pages. The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England is, unsurprisingly, Ian Mortimer's follow-up to the Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and works on the same concept, namely telling you what you would need to know if you were taking a trip in time to visit a country you think you know but from which you are separated by getting on for five centuries. I liked the earlier book, and, minus only the discovery-of-a-neat-new-idea factor, also very much liked this.

I'll say what I said in 2010, that though Mortimer's concept is not fantastically innovative as the publisher's blurb might have you believe, he does it really well and delivers a satisfying and original book as a result. The main impression you come away with, in the words of the cliché, is that the past really is another country. A visit to Elizabethan England would be more alienating, dangerous and exotic that visiting almost anywhere in the modern world. 

The routine nature of excruciating cruelty, the utter pervasiveness of religious belief in every aspect of daily life, the mind-bogglingly obtuse and ignorant exercise of medicine (a case in point), the unhygienic conditions of daily life and the rigidity of the social class system are all things that would disconcert the time traveller considerably. Similarly, for all Mortimer's helpful provision of a mini Elizabethan phrase book, including a guise to swearing and cursing, the language would probably flummox the modern Brit rather more than he or she would expect.


Still, notwithstanding it all, just as flicking through the Lonely Planet guide to Afghanistan might excite some interest in actually going to see for oneself, so Mortimer succeeds in transmitting a fascination for this alien world that is our own country in the past. Just as long as you can cash in your return ticket at short notice when you're being dragged to the stocks (or worse) for offending some contemporary sensibility, the trip is a tempting one and the book an easy and fun read (except when it goes on way too long about Elizabethan menus...). 

Recommended? Yes. Difficult to see how anyone could not enjoy this book.