A Medieval Miscellany

Book excerpt: This dazzlingly beautiful book, containing over four hundred full-color illustrations from medieval manuscripts, is basically the Middle Ages speaking for itself. These scenes from medieval life often appear familiar, intensely human, and recognizable, yet also distant. They depict the everyday concerns of people who loved, worried, feasted, starved, warred, and prayed across a vast area from Scandinavia to Constantinople, from Ireland to Sicily, and from Spain to Jerusalem for nearly a thousand years. Many recorded their fears, jokes, and anxieties, especially with their health and pains, as well as their delights. This miscellany reproduces their own words from poems, chronicles, wills, romances, epitaphs, letters, and legal regulations--and all have been translated into modern English. Drawn from history, but in no way a history, A Medieval Miscellany is a mosaic, necessarily incomplete, where the bright tesserae have been gathered from every corner and period of the medieval world.