Polack Dr Gillian - The Middle Ages unlocked a guide to life in Medieval England, 1050-1300

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Polack Dr Gillian The Middle Ages unlocked a guide to life in Medieval England, 1050-1300
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The Middle Ages unlocked a guide to life in Medieval England, 1050-1300: summary, description and annotation

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Overview: To our modern minds, the Middle Ages seem to mix the well-known and familiar with wildly alien concepts and circumstances. The Middle Ages Unlocked provides an invaluable introduction to this complex and dynamic period in England. Exploring a wide range of topics from law, religion and education to landscape, art and magic, between the eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, the structures, institutions and circumstances that formed the basis for daily life and society are revealed. Drawing on their expertise in history and archaeology, Dr Gillian Polack and Dr Katrin Kania look at the tangible aspects of daily life - ranging from the raw materials used for crafts, clothing and jewellery to housing and food - in order to bring the Middle Ages to life. The Middle Ages Unlocked dispels modern assumptions about this period to uncover the complex tapestry of medieval England and the people who lived there.

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To Tamara Mazzei without whom this book and others would not exist First - photo 1
To Tamara Mazzei without whom this book and others would not exist First - photo 2

To Tamara Mazzei, without whom this book (and others) would not exist.

First published 2015

Amberley Publishing
The Hill, Stroud
Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

www.amberley-books.com

Copyright Gillian Polack & Katrin Kania, 2015

The moral right of Gillian Polack & Katrin Kania to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781445645834 (PRINT)
ISBN 9781445645896 (eBOOK)

Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.
Printed in the UK.

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A common truth about a book is that it will make family members suffer, so the very first thank you for unending patience and support goes to Frieder Pfeiffer, without whom this book would not have happened. A big thank you also goes to the other side of the globe, to Sonya Oberman, another long-suffering family member.

This book that their support made possible is a very special creature with its own history, not only because two people from almost opposite sides of the globe got together to make it happen. The idea for the book was born more than a decade ago by Tamara Mazzei, Gillian Polack and a group of writers and readers who felt that a book like this was important. A first outline was written and draft chapters ensued. But a venture of this size and complexity is not an easy one. The first writing team was affected by major life changes, and finally Gillian recruited Katrin to balance specialisations. It took time and several iterations to arrive at the book you hold in your hands today. It also showed us many hidden cultural differences and made two distinctive writing voices merge, which was an interesting experience for both of us.

Therefore our next and very big thank you goes to Tamara, who had a big part in getting this Beast of a book started and who put in a vast amount of work on it before life took her and the book in different directions.

Our second thank you goes to the internet (with a special mention of the residents of LMB, penman-review and other mail lists with a medieval focus), without which this book would also never have happened. When two authors live on different continents, email and online contact make things possible. The internet enabled us to meet online and it provided us with ways to check current research. It also let us find images for the book, thanks to the graciousness of institutions such as the British Library, who make a lot of their pictures available as Creative Commons, or the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and Arche Warder, who generously provided illustrations from their archives. A special thank you here goes to Andy Chopping from Museum of London Archaeology for his very kind help at the last minute. The internet was also how we could ask for, and receive, the help of people from various places. In particular, Nikolaus Hofbauer, Christina Curreli, Stefan von der Heide, David Lazenby, Ralf Metzner, Indra Starke-Ottich and Sonja Natus from the IG Wolf and Rosemary Watson all put in a lot of effort to help us with pictures, both pretty and informative. Thanks related to pictures also go to Achim Mller, Klaus Biehl, Florian Ottenburg and the crafters mentioned in the picture captions, as well as the few whose names we do not know.

There are other people who need to be thanked. This Beast of a book has been growing for a fair while and quite a few people have helped out with comments or support, thoughts or reality checks during that time. These wonderful people include: Elizabeth Chadwick, Felicity Pulman (who tested several versions for us!), Jenny Polack, Lara Eakins, the late Les Oberman, Mike Mazzei, Nanci Lamb Roider, Nancy Barber, Rania Melhem, Shana Worthen, Sharyn Lilley, Jon Swabey, Suzie Eisfelder, Wendy Zollo, Rita and Peter Kania, Bettina von Stockfleth, Lars Thomsen and Lars Krger. Thanks also go to the organisers of the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, for that is where Gillian received much encouragement and where the authors met. In fact, Katrin first met the Beast in the conference bar

FOREWORD
BY ELIZABETH CHADWICK

Writing historical fiction set in the Middle Ages has been my career since 1990, but it came about almost by accident. I had told myself stories from early childhood but had never written them down. Always verbal tales, they generally involved my passion of the moment. Horses featured a lot, as did dragons, Thunderbirds Are Go and Star Trek. However, the mould was eventually made for me when I was fifteen and fell madly in love with a twelfth-century knight in flowing white robes as portrayed in a childrens TV series titled Desert Crusader. It was a French production, dubbed by the BBC and it aired every Thursday at about 5 p.m. Being at that impressionable age and awash with hormones, I decided the only way to deal with the overload to my system was to write a story loosely based on my hero and let my imagination run wild.

I duly set pen to paper, but swiftly realised that wild imagination would only take me so far if I wanted to create a work of historical fiction that felt satisfyingly authentic. I knew very little about the Middle Ages. I had received a basic grounding in the subject at school, but the operative word was basic. I also knew a little from watching films and the occasional documentary on TV, but it wasnt enough and I had a thirst for knowledge. What did people wear? What fabrics? What colours? How were they made? What did people eat and how? How long did it take to get from England to Jerusalem? How did they tell the time? Did they bathe? How did they go about the matter of prayer? The list was endless, but I was young enough to be undaunted. The only thing to do was visit the library and start researching. I still remember the huge excitement of finding out that a twelfth-century sword only weighed around four pounds and that, contrary to what Id been taught at school, a warhorse wasnt a hulking great beast of seventeen hands, but a smaller, stocky animal, capable of fast manoeuvre and easy to mount.

The more I found out, the more I wanted to know. Looking back at my research, it was never organised, but rather just one great organic sprawl that grew out of what I needed to know to write whatever happened to be my work in progress at the time and there were eight unpublished novels before I finally cracked the market with The Wild Hunt. I acquired the knowledge in my own idiosyncratic way, but it was decades in the doing. It would have been wonderful to have had The Middle Ages Unlocked as a starter volume all those years ago. I might have saved myself a great deal of time. Rather than wandering all over the place like an inebriated spider, Id have had a route map to follow!

Basically, this book does what it says on the jacket. It unlocks the Middle Ages for everyone for general readers who want a quick reference work on their shelves or for teachers who need to develop knowledge on the subject for their class. Its for their students to read, its for re-enactors keen to get a handy overview of their period and its definitely for writers of historical fiction who need to understand the basics of everyday life in the thirteenth century, but dont want to spend forty years doing it!

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