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Chargement... A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century (original 1991; édition 1991)par Tania Bayard (Directeur de publication)
Information sur l'oeuvreA Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century par Tania Bayard (1991)
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This small volume comprises selections from a middle-aged Frenchman's instructions to his much younger bride on a wide range of topics, most of which guide the practical matters of running a medieval household. The gentleman's devotion to detail, and the time he apparently spent preparing these written instructions, is impressive. I would be interested in reading a translation of the full text. I thought this was going to be one of those "written by a historian, this is what life was like way back when" books. In fact, it's an actual housekeeping guide written by a 15th-century French guy and edited and translated by Tania Bayard. I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had known. But it is a good illustration of both medieval housekeeping and the medieval mindset, and valuable to people researching the period. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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A fascinating window into the daily life of a medieval household, originally written as instructions for a young wife from her husband-with more then fifty medieval woodcuts and printed in two colors throughout. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)640.944023Technology Home and family management Home management Biography; History By Place EuropeClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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and domestic instruction written in 1393 by an elderly citizen
of Paris for his fifteen-year old wife.
THE MEDIEVAL HOME COMPANION certainly succeeds as a charming
curiosity of domestic advice from fourteenth-century France. The author, an elderly husband eager to instruct his much younger wife in all the niceties of deportment and housekeeping, offers kindly advice on subjects ranging from respectable dress to ridding the bedroom of fleas to managing servants to the proper season for planting various edibles. He even includes some of his favorite recipes for compote (using five hundred new walnuts), hippocras, four kinds of wafers and candied orange
peel.
Illustrating the text are reproductions of forty medieval
woodcuts depicting such daily tasks as grinding spices, caring
for the sick and bargaining with a merchant.
A reader unfamiliar with the Middle Ages will certainly gain
a feel for the daily lives and responsibilities of householders.
The author, a prosperous citizen with wide-ranging knowledge,
obviously dotes on his young wife, and desires to teach her how
to not only please him, but also to please a second husband, a
likely possibility given the gap in their ages.
Beyond the charm of the book, however, lies little of value
to more informed readers. Bayard has only chosen to include
less than one-fourth of the original text, admittedly omitting
lengthy discussions about chastity, worship, and honor. While
this decision was made to make the book more approachable to
twentieth-century readers, it not only undermines the scholarly
usefulness of the text, but also the broad picture of medieval
life it purports to convey. ( )