2 posts tagged “medieval”
I feel bad reviewing a book that I'm only half-done with, but it's for good reason: this book is awesome. Written in 1954 about the real lives of Katherine of Swynford and John of Gaunt, it is meticulously researched and beautifully written.
Katherine, like many women of the 14th century, suffered an arranged marriage of financial convenience. She fell in love with her feudal lord, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and this book focuses on that ill-fated romance.
I'm approximately halfway through - Katherine has married Hugh Swynford and borne two children to him, but John has admitted his love to her after the death of his saintly wife. If you don't already know the history of their affair, I won't spoil it for you, but it is an incredibly compelling story. I am convinced that the ending will be equally as good.
What I love the most about this book is how casually Seton writes details of medieval life that I am even now learning about in my Disease and World Societies class - the dual ideas that plague was caused by miasma (bad air) and that it could also be transmitted person to person - and at the same time, the permeating belief that it was a punishment sent from God. Seton mentions chillblains, dirty hands, medieval food, Chaucer (Swynford's brother-in-law), buboes, and even the fact that "anyone who coughs up blood dies" - meaning that anyone who had pneumonic plague, and coughed up blood, died within two days, with no exceptions. Little details like that make my reading experience so incredibly pleasurable, because the author obviously cares about making her book a realistic portrayal of life in the Middle Ages, as much as possible.
I highly recommend this book.
Maybe I will use this instead of All Consuming for my product/book/music reviews. I do like the interface better. I initially balked at asking for a vox invite because, yeah, I need to join another meme-type website. But. I am a sucker.
With that said, time to review a book. I read this yesterday after someone on All Consuming recommended it to me due to it being about medieval history (which is my specialty, more or less). The premise is that a girl in an English college, from 2054 time-travels back to 1320 so she can see what the Middle Ages were really like. This part, especially, was extremely relatable to me. I think the saddest part about history is that a lot of these fascinating time periods are lost forever.
So that part was great. But something goes terribly wrong, of course, which I won't blab about here (although to anyone with even a minor degree of historical knowledge can probably figure it out before the Big Reveal). This event is paralleled in 2054, despite the technological innovations of the present day, and it is a device meant to link the present with the past. Unfortunately, to me, all of the 2054 scenes were quite boring and I wanted to skip through them to see how the heroine dealt with her medieval counterparts.
As far as historical accuracy, it was pretty good. The heroine was likeable, and headstrong, but the best part of the book is that it reminds the reader that history isn't just "dead white guys" (which is such an obnoxious statement I don't even know where to begin - anyone who says it hasn't taken a history class lately) but real people who lived and loved and died, often in obscurity. There were a lot of loose ends the author didn't really tie up, the ending was disappointing, and everyone in the present day was flat and just seemed like plot devices.
I would give it three out of five stars, and recommend it if you like time travel or medieval history.
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