- 400 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The Middle Ages are known as a god-fearing time, a time of hard work and of squalid living conditions for the majority of the population – or as a time of opulence that graced only the courts and halls of the reigning monarch. In The Secret Middle Ages, Malcolm Jones presents a completely fresh view of the medieval world that will blow all stereotypes out of the water.
Using a wealth of little-known and recently discovered artefacts, and drawing particularly on humbler artworks, Jones paints a compelling picture of the visual environment of the great mass of ordinary people between 1200 and 1550. The picture that emerges is of a civilisation that is both like and unlike our own – one that teems with the richness of life and its contradictions. We find beliefs and traditions rendered memorable by the vivid, creative imagination and strong visual culture of the Middle Ages. Love, hatred, crime and punishment, proverbs, heaven on earth, husband-beating – all feature in the jewellery, tableware, illustrations, carvings and textiles of the period.
A major reassessment of the high medieval period, this revised and updated edition of The Secret Middle Ages is essential reading for anyone curious about their ancestors. As Jones writes, gems and precious metals may dazzle the eye, but a pewter brooch – tawdry as it may appear – has the power to reveal far more of the real medieval world.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword to the 2025 Edition
- Foreword to the 2002 Edition
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions and Abbreviations
- One Love, Death and Biscuits
- Two Magical Metal, Silly Saints and Risible Relics: The Art and Artefacts of Popular Religion
- Three Licked into Shape: Animal Symbolism
- Four Why Englishmen Have Tails: The Iconography of Nationality and Race and the Uses of Monstrosity
- Five Signs of Infamy: The Iconography of Humiliation and Insult
- Six The Fool and the Attributes of Folly
- Seven Shoeing the Goose: The Representation of Proverbs and Proverbial Follies in Art
- Eight Nonsense, Pure and Applied
- Nine Narratives – Heroic and Not So Heroic
- Ten Hearts and Flowers and Parrots: The Iconography of Love
- Eleven Who Wears the Trousers: Gender Relations
- Twelve Wicked Willies with Wings: Sex and Sexuality in Late Medieval Art and Thought
- Thirteen Tailpiece: The Uses of Scatology
- Conclusion
- Notes and References
- Plates