Sumptuary laws prevented men of a lower class from wearing certain kinds of fur or forbade the purchase of imported cloth in order to boost local economies licensing laws worked to prevent widows from turning their living rooms into alehouses, or to protect brothels from constabulary scrutiny. Goodman instead concentrates on laws that touch on day-to-day life, each of which echoes larger concerns about scarcity, social climbing, sexual expression and global trade. Given the mountains of scholarship on the high-stakes political landscape of the era, How to Be a Tudor wisely skips most of the court intrigue. Scholars even released pamphlets scolding the youth on the bawdy language of their popular songs if that doesn't make the past come alive, nothing will. The rush floors might be obsolete, but the crucial importance of ephemeral etiquette and the social panic about those who aimed above their station haven't changed at all. Her description of an Elizabethan suit of clothes is positively breathless, and tracing the amount of work that went into making even a modest Tudor meal is enough to make you want a nap by proxy. But what you lose in extant documentation, you gain in the visceral detail that comes with hands-on experience.
In fact, Goodman's Tudor research sounds like detective work as much as anything, from sorting out the proper bookkeeping allocations for shirts in tradesmen's wills to figuring out the invisible steps left out of advice manuals in their instructions for making cheese. Then again, that's no surprise, given that the literacy rates of Tudor England hit a maximum of about 30 percent, and documentation is trickier to come by - and that's before you start looking for genetically accurate manchet wheat to make your period-correct bread. For those hoping for an identical experience, How to Be a Tudor doesn't quite reach the same breadth of detail that went into How to Be a Victorian. This isn't the first time Goodman has immersed herself in a bygone era she previously tackled the 19th century in How to Be a Victorian. In How to Be a Tudor, billed as "a dawn-to-dusk guide to Tudor life," she recounts her experiences with lower- and middle-class daily habits, including Elizabethan hygiene regimens (not bad), rush-mat floors (quite nice), roasting meat on a spit (spectacular) and attempting to plow fields for planting (sad trombone). It's a good thing, then, that Ruth Goodman seriously commits to her research. Sometimes you want your history close to home. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title How to Be a Tudor Subtitle A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life Author Ruth Goodman
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