276°
Posted 20 hours ago

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides)

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Ian Mortimer doesn't hold with any fancy notion about the past being impossible to know. Not for him the Mortimer also tries to bring us living history by using the second person and the present tense throughout. So, you are travelling into the city, you are sitting down at table, you are eyeing up a cross-looking band of outlaws and deciding whether it is safe to run. It is a verbal tic, the present tense especially, which has become the default voice for documentaries and which is now creeping into history writing. This relentless presentism can seem irritating, until you remember that the perfect tense, in which history has conventionally been told, is equally arbitrary. As Mortimer points out, if you are to experience the 14th century the way he intends, then you must do so in the unspooling moment, oblivious to what lies ahead.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment