Audiobook20 hours
The Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain: A Handbook for Visitors to the Seventeenth Century: 1660-1699
Written by Ian Mortimer
Narrated by Roger Clark
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Imagine you could see the smiles of the people mentioned in Samuel Pepys's diary, hear the shouts of market traders, and touch their wares. How would you find your way around? Where would you stay? What would you wear? Where might you be suspected of witchcraft? Where would you be welcome?
This is an up-close-and-personal look at Britain between the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 and the end of the century. The last witch is sentenced to death just two years before Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, the bedrock of modern science, is published. Religion still has a severe grip on society and yet some-including the king-flout every moral convention they can find. There are great fires in London and Edinburgh; the plague disappears; a global trading empire develops.
Over these four dynamic decades, the last vestiges of medievalism are swept away and replaced by a tremendous cultural flowering. Why are half the people you meet under the age of twenty-one? What is considered rude? And why is dueling so popular? Ian Mortimer delves into the nuances of daily life to paint a vibrant and detailed picture of society at the dawn of the modern world as only he can.
This is an up-close-and-personal look at Britain between the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 and the end of the century. The last witch is sentenced to death just two years before Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, the bedrock of modern science, is published. Religion still has a severe grip on society and yet some-including the king-flout every moral convention they can find. There are great fires in London and Edinburgh; the plague disappears; a global trading empire develops.
Over these four dynamic decades, the last vestiges of medievalism are swept away and replaced by a tremendous cultural flowering. Why are half the people you meet under the age of twenty-one? What is considered rude? And why is dueling so popular? Ian Mortimer delves into the nuances of daily life to paint a vibrant and detailed picture of society at the dawn of the modern world as only he can.
Author
Ian Mortimer
Ian Mortimer is the author of the bestselling Time Traveller's Guide series. He is an experienced lecturer and public speaker and regularly appears at literary festivals around the country. He is also writes for the media.
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Reviews for The Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain
Rating: 4.098039215686274 out of 5 stars
4/5
51 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Like “The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England”, this is a very lively history book. Don’t expect dry facts. Expect instead an engaging narrative throughout.All that can be covered in Restoration Britain is covered, including the different classes, the vast array of ailments, and the Great Fire. The main focus is on England, though Scotland and Wales are mentioned here and there.If you’re interested in seventeenth-century history – or even if you aren’t – give this a try.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I liked a lot about the Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain, mainly the details about daily life and travel that give context to one of my favorite eras of literature back in my university days. The topics are fairly wide-ranging and do give a good picture of how society was changing in the early modern era.There is a lot to not like, too. There are no maps or diagrams, which are sorely needed when describing the spread of the Great Fire of London in 1666, or comparing different architectural styles that were coming into vogue. While there are color plates with portraits of famous people or photos of significant buildings or art, much is assumed the reader will already be familiar with or has readily accessible. (Frankly, I had a difficult time tracking down easy-reference maps of London in 1666.)It would have also been very useful to have a list of people featured with brief descriptions. There is a bibliography, but not a good descriptive list of who people are, when they lived, or what they did. Since Mortimer relies on many different sources and jumps between them according to topic, he also jumps between years, and it can be difficult to keep track of everyone.While this uses a "Time Traveler Guide" concept, it assumes the time traveler is a wealthy white male. Topics about women or minorities - or the vast majority of ordinary men - only come up as they are relevant to the assumed time traveler. This is less than ideal, and was frustrating when I wanted to know about certain very ordinary facts of life. Mortimer goes into great detail about toilet things - he mentions shitting in fireplaces, muckrakers, even men's drawers and other underclothes - but he spares not a single word about menstruation. It seems this is pretty vital information for any time traveler who menstruates, no?Further, there were two places where Mortimer's white-male interests were painfully clear and made me distrust most of his social commentary: one, he describes how the social structure of the time was misogynistic as an effect of its patriarchy and the Great Chain of Being, then denies that this is actually misogyny since people don't really hate women and besides, women themselves think they are lesser and impure (has Mortimer ever really engaged with the concept of structural misogyny?); two, in the brief section on ethnic minorities, he talks about slavery and explains that non-white people are typically foreign visitors and treated badly, or enslaved people from The Plantations (ie: colonies), and they have no freedom, yet he also describes several black servants who live freely in their own homes when not at work, just like white servants, and seemingly not actually enslaved. Both times, his descriptions and his commentary are at odds, and he dismisses the issues as not relevant.Most of the book seems to come from three places: Samuel Pepys's and John Evelyn's diaries for daily life in London, and Celia Fienne's journal for descriptions of other places. Where sources diverge, they are mainly also wealthy men and usually of London. It is therefore somewhat understandable that so much of the focus of the book is on the upper classes in London and especially men, but nonetheless this seems to negate the whole point of a Time Traveler's Guide.Besides, I know for a fact that Pepys referred to his wife's menstruation (he calls it her Mois and her "old trouble") and even John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, refers to it in his poetry, which Mortimer refers to multiple times for its usefulness in shedding light on less socially acceptable opinions. This is only one thing I found to be a noticeable gap in the book, but what else is missing? Why is there so little focus on how ordinary people engaged with the many diversions that the wealthy did? Why is it titled "Restoration Britain" when it's more truly "Restoration London, with occasional sidetrips to look at Scotland through fieldglasses or maybe picnic in Oxford".I wish the book had been better. It could have been. But the dismissal of women and lack of concern for minorities, except when either affect Mortimer's imagined self, means I can't recommend this book or series to anyone, and I have to hope that something better exists.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Read for #NonfictionNovember2017 Scholarship category.I love Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's histories. This is the second I've read in the series and the first one that I've read on an era that I don't know much about. The Restoration has never been a focus so this book taught me quite a few things. The author does his best to put you in the era by giving you the sights and smells as if you were actually walking down the street in a village, town or city. It really does seem like you're there by his descriptions. I still have one more in this set to read and I hope that he continues with these books, they're one of my new favorites in the history genre.