Medieval Horizons
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  • Published: 24 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529906080
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $37.00
Categories:

Medieval Horizons

Why the Middle Ages Matter

Formats & editions
Paperback
11 Jun 2024
Audiobook
24 Mar 2022
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An essential short introduction to the Middle Ages - and the companion volume to Ian Mortimer's bestselling The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England.

We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark and backward time, characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. We believe that life was unchanging over the period, so if a peasant fell asleep in in the year 1000 and woke up six hundred years later, he would return to a world that was instantly recognisable. We hold that change is facilitated by science and technological innovation, and that it was the inventions of recent centuries, from the steam engine to the Internet, that created the modern world.

We couldn't be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating introduction to the Middle Ages, people's horizons - their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world -- expanded dramatically. All aspects of life - politics and economics, religion and the arts - were utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, in the process laying the foundations on which our modern lives rest.

If Ian Mortimer's bestselling Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England revealed what it was like to live in the fourteenth century, Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the period as a whole. It looks at the Middle Ages through the prism of a small range of topics - ranging from warfare to religion, travel to architecture, inequality to a new sense of self - thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as one of the most important eras in our past, about which any reader with an interest in history should care.
  • Published: 24 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529906080
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $37.00
Categories:

About the author

Ian Mortimer

Dr Ian Mortimer is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England and The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies, and numerous scholarly articles on subjects ranging in date from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998. His work on the social history of medicine won the Alexander Prize (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.

portrait photo of Ian Mortimer

Also by Ian Mortimer

1415: Henry V's Year of Glory
The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain
Human Race
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England Brain Shot
The Greatest Traitor
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
See all

Praise for Medieval Horizons

Provocative and refreshing. Medieval Horizons overturns many myths about the Middle Ages, showing that far from an era of stagnation, it was a period of profound change which has shaped today's world

Seb Falk, author of The Light Ages

Superb ... Mortimer allows us to make wonderfully compelling connections with our forebears

Guardian on The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

His aim, triumphantly achieved, is to engage our sympathies with people whose similarities to us are as fascinating as their differences

Sunday Telegraph on The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

Perhaps the most enjoyable history book I've read all year

Independent on The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

The endlessly inventive Ian Mortimer is the most remarkable medieval historian of our time

The Times on The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

The word 'medieval' has become synonymous with 'backwards, ignorant, violent and superstitious.' But here Mortimer reminds us that our modern world is not the result of the technological developments of the past few centuries. Instead, our cultural, personal, social and environmental identities were forged in the medieval period. By shedding light on the important developments made from the first millennium to 1600, Mortimer asks us to redraw our understanding of the past

Janina Ramirez, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Femina

Medieval Horizons doesn't set out to be a comprehensive survey of medieval England, but rather challenges us to rethink the Middle Ages and its social, cultural and intellectual innovations. Mortimer is a compelling advocate for our medieval inheritance. He is right that we should be proud of it

The Times

A sparkling re-evalutation of the Middle Ages ... An eye-opening book that challenges our preconceptions and prejudices about the past

Mail on Sunday

In this razor-sharp book, Mortimer argues the case for the wonder of the Middle Ages with rigour, verve and, above all, evidence

Spectator

[A] spirited defence of the era ... Compelling stuff from one of the leading experts on the subjects

History Revealed

Ian Mortimer is a wonderfully readable writer

Daily Mail

Fascinating

Times Literary Supplement

An account of a profoundly misunderstood period, which shows that the Middle Ages were not marked by violence and superstition. Instead, huge steps in social and economic progress were made, and the foundations of the modern world were laid

The Economist

This enlightening account shows there was more to the period than plague, superstition and violence

Economist, *Books of the Year*