Customer Reviews

Daily Living in the Twelfth Century

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To most modern people, Europe's Middle Ages consisted of jousting tournaments of knights, damsels in conical headgear awaiting rescue, and Arthur's Round Table. In fact, specific details of life for peasants, artisans, and even kings in the so-called Dark Ages from the 9th to the 15th centuries are relatively few, scarcer by far than those culled from the Athens of Pericles or the Rome of the Caesars. Of seeming necessity, most books about life in the days between Charlemagne and Henry VIII present facts about European life in the 9th century alongside details of life in the 14th, a method that is about as reliable as discussing commoners and lords in the reign of Elizabeth I by using anecdotes about France under Napoleon. Daily Living in the Twelfth Century by Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr. is a rare exception to this situation. It is an account of what Alexander Neckam, a cleric from Dunstable, England saw and experienced in the months of 1177-78 on a journey to Paris where he would study and teach for a number of years. While the author's technique is novelistic, he draws on materials dating from the time, notably observations written by Neckam himself. In the narrative, Neckam travels from Dunstble, 34 miles northwest of London, through that great bustling capital, and on to Dover where he sets sail across the channel and traverses crumbling Roman roads, visits minor barons, and copes with student housing in the great city of Paris. Holmes artfully weaves in details from water porters to straw-covered floors, presenting a you-are-there sensory experience that illuminates Neckam's bond with the modern reader as much as it illustrates their differences.

Tons of citations, tons of primary-source documentation. It's a gorgeous book, full of information about life in a very specific time-period. This isn't a general "medieval" resource -- it is a resource about London and Paris of the years 1150-1200 and that.. is.. it. I wish it went into more detail in places (such as how women lived), but one can't argue that it's probably the best book of its kind concerning this time period. There are recipes, instructions for planting gardens, herbalism and medicine notes, information on how ironsmiths and goldsmiths worked, architectural notes, and loads of tidbits about how students lived (since the book's primary source is a 12th-century student's writings), stuff about jousts.. you name it, just about. The author sounds like he might have lived there, he's so familiar with his material. Effortlessly, he spins his stories, and his writing style is quite pleasant to read. I'd certainly and without reservations consider this book a must-have for anybody interested in this time period. I just wonder that it took me so long to find it -- it was written in the 50s!

This book also comes out in softcover from Wisconsin Press and is currently in print.

For researchers of the period when romantic love was being invented in spite of a period of brutality and passionate Crusading, this gives some insight into the life and times of an ordinary point of view. The language could be richer and a sense of the history deeper, but I still found my used version of this which I got from Amazon a worthwhile addition to my research.