How to be a Tudor: A dawn-to-dusk guide to Tudor life
Ruth Goodman
2016, 336 pages
Setting: Tudor England
Ruth Goodman is back, and living life as a Tudor. After a previous stint living like a Victorian (How to be a Victorian), she goes back further in time to explore how the English people of the 1500s lived. Recreating the conditions of the period (from how beds were constructed to the different type of wheat that they ate), she serves as a guide to the deeply religious, surprisingly clean, incredibly resource-strapped era of Shakespeare, Henry VIII and the dawn of England’s modern age.
Although not as detailed as How to be a Victorian (Goodman is working with fewer available sources), How to be a Tudor is just as enjoyable. Goodman’s lighthearted style of writing makes the information entertaining, and her command of the details sets this book apart. For example, the idea of Tudor clothing as modular with different sleeves, cuffs, collars, linings and trimmings being added and subtracted from an outfit using pins added depth to the information that almost everyone owned at most one complete set of clothes.
This book was thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.
Nora Cascadden Concord Public Library
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