The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

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What everyday life was really like in Shakespeare's England.

The rule of the Virgin Queen, the works of Shakespeare, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and voyages of exploration have given the Elizabethan period its golden glow. Ian Mortimer asks what life actually felt like beneath it.

Walk into London in the 1590s and practical questions arrive quickly. Where can you stay? What should you wear? How do you travel? What will you eat? What happens if you become ill, break the law or practise the wrong religion?

Using contemporary accounts, household records, travel writing, legal evidence and printed manuals, Mortimer reconstructs a young, crowded and sharply hierarchical society. Population growth, poverty, religious persecution, famine, disease and violence sit beside glorious architecture, global curiosity, theatre and entertainment and some of the finest writing in the English language.

This is history experienced through food, clothing, housing, medicine and religion, revealing a society both startlingly unfamiliar and recognisably on the road towards the modern world.

‘A fresh and funny book that wears its learning lightly’ Independent

‘Vivid trip back to the 16th century…highly entertaining book’ Guardian

Ian Mortimer manages to inform and delight in equal measure.
Sue Baker, The Bookseller

About Ian Mortimer

Dr Ian Mortimer is the Sunday Times-bestselling author of the Time Traveller's Guides to Medieval England, Elizabethan England, Restoration Britain and Regency Britain, as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998. His work on the social history of medicine won the Alexander Prize in 2004 and was published by the Royal Historical Society in 2009. He lives with his wife and three children in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor.

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