Time Traveller's Guide To Elizabethan England

Product Description

We think of Queen Elizabeth I as ' Gloriana': the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (1558-1603) as a golden age of maritime heroes like Sir Walter Raleigh Sir Richard Grenville & Sir Francis Drake & of great writers such as Edmund Spenser Christopher Marlowe Ben Jonson & William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past & walk the streets of London in the 1590s where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? & if so how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants diseases violence sexism & famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a prospective traveller to late sixteenth-century England would ask. Applying the groundbreaking approach he pioneered in his bestselling Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England the Elizabethan" world unfolds around the reader. He shows a society making great discoveries & winning military victories & yet at the same time being troubled by its new-found awareness. It is a country in which life expectancy at birth is in the early thirties people still starve to death & Catholics are persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language & some of the most magnificent architecture & sees Elizabeth's subjects settle in America & circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is in all its contradictions the very crucible of the modern world."