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Unfortunately, a lot of history either concentrates on famous people who, odds are, you would never have gotten to meet if you’d lived at the same time, or tries to make sense of evidence assembled about the past (newspapers, public records) in order to assemble an argument. Which doesn’t help much when you just want to know how you might have gone to the bathroom in ancient Crete, where indoor plumbing was allegedly invented. Or to get a sense of what it was like to be alive then, what it was like, say, to be an ordinary person at a time when ordinary people were just starting to believe that the world was round.
This is actually Mortimer’s second time traveler’s guide. The first, to medieval England, came out about five years ago. The impetus to write it, though, was many years ago, when Mortimer was nine or ten and visited the ruins of a 14th-century castle in Wales.
Like a good guidebook, though, The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England is an entertaining read. Particularly since, the more you learn about the period, the less you might actually want to go there even if it were possible, which Mortimer freely acknowledges in his introduction. As his accounts make abundantly clear, it was dirty, it was smelly, food was not always guaranteed, the political situation was unstable despite (or sometimes because of) Queen Elizabeth’s absolute power, and life could seem frighteningly unstable.
