Medieval People [RARE BOOKS]

In this classic of social history, the author describes the lives of five obscure men and women of the Middle Ages and one famous one. She draws on account books, records, letters, diaries, and wills to make the life of those times as concrete and compre- hensible as our own. There are full-length portraits of Bodo, a Frankish peasant in the time of Charlemagne (ninth century); Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler-only one of many-of the thirteenth century; Madame Eglentyne, the Prioress of Chaucer's Canter- bury Tales, whose life can be copiously filled out from the records of the nunneries of four- teenth-century England; the young (fifteen- year-old) wife of a fourteenth-century Pa- risian bourgeois who wrote a book of advice for her covering everything from her proper behavior toward her husband to the proper preparation of snails; two English merchants of the fifteenth century, Thomas Betson of the wool trade and Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, an Essex clothier.