| Terry Jones' Medieval Lives | 
 enlarge | Authors: Terry Jones, Alan Ereira
Publisher: BBC Books
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 19317
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0563522755
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780563522751
ASIN: 0563522755
Publication Date: May 5, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: ***Same day dispatch from UK***
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Terry Jones has it in for the Renaissance. It was the humanists of the Renaissance who created the standard image of the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance, misery and superstition and it is this image that Medieval Lives, the book based on Jones's BBC TV series, aims to dispel. According to Jones the men of the Renaissance could hardly have been more wrong. To him the medieval period is one of endless fascination, and its people not the benighted barbarians the humanists imagined but members of a rich and vibrant culture. Taking some of the standard stereotypes of medieval people we all have--the peasant, the outlaw, the monk, the damsel--he investigates the reality behind the image. What he reveals undermines our conventional views of the Middle Ages. Peasants were not all illiterate clods, spending their short and miserable lives in back-breaking labour on the land. Many of them could read a little--even Latin--and most worked fewer days of the year than their counterparts in the 19th century. Women in the period were not the downtrodden chattels of their lords and masters but were often more in charge of their destinies than they would be in later centuries. All this slaying of the dragons of misrepresentation of the medieval era makes for exhilarating reading. Jones sometimes plays too much on his Python persona. Did we really need him to dress up for the camera so much in some of the book's photographs? (The picture of him in drag as a coyly smirking damsel on page 191 is particularly scary.) Yet his own enthusiasm for his subject is infectious and this is a thoroughly entertaining and eye-opening book. --Nick Rennison
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| Customer Reviews:
 Disappointing October 27, 2007
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I suppose I should have anticipated it - a book of just over 200 pages cannot do justice to all aspects of life in Britain over a period of hundreds of years. It is `history light' - oversimplified to the point of being misleading. It gives partial pictures and picks out exceptions, presenting them as the norm. This, of course, makes easy and amusing reading but gives a distorted impression of the period.
 Amusing look at medieval people. July 2, 2004
25 out of 28 found this review helpful
Each chapter in this very enjoyable book deals with a different type of Medieval person, the Peasant, the Lady, the Knight, the Monk etc, and shows that the reality is often very different from the popular stereotype. For instance, in the chapter about the Peasant we learn that the lot of the common people was not as bad as we might have been led to believe, and that Medieval peasants had in gneral a higher standard of living, and far more legal rights than is generally believed. The chapter on the Lady shows how women in Medieval society also had far more autonomy than is usally thought, and we learn about women managing estates, running businesses, and being able to obtain divorce for a variety of different reasons (the bit about impotent men being examined by a jury of matrons is particularly hilarious). The chapter on the Philosopher is one of the most interesting in the book, it shows that science and medicine were far more advanced in medieval times than is generally thought. Medieval doctors were much more effective at curing diseases than they are usally given credit for, and they even understood the use of anaesthetics. I would have liked it if the book had said a little more about women in general (for istance, in the chapter on the Philosopher, there is no mention of the fact that there were women physicians in the Middle Ages). And I was a little surprised to fidn that Terry Jones apparently takes seriously the apologists for Richard III. But these are minor quibbles. Overall, this is a very amusing and interesting book, and it gorgeously illustrated throuhgout with exquisite colour pictures from Medieval art.
 At last an accessible account to redress the balance... March 9, 2004
38 out of 42 found this review helpful
At last, a book -and excellent TV series- to redress the balance in the propaganda war that is history. This book is superb and very accessible for young people. They will never look at the Middle Ages in the same way again... despite what they might have learnt in school! Rule one for any historian is to have a healthy disregard for the official line!
I was especially pleased to see that Terry Jones has some sensible comments to make about Richard III and the so-called Princes in the Tower (could have done with a bit more about the later.) At least he recognises Shakespeare's image of Richard as Tudor propaganda based on commentaries from the likes of More and Rous who changed his spin with the current king! Jones does not engage in Ricardian hysteria either, so it makes the short section on Richard III very readable.
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