The Secret Middle Ages: Discovering the Real Medieval World

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.

Malcolm Jones is a leading authority on medieval folklore and folk customs, appearing on national and local radio. He is lecturer in folklore and folklife studies at the University of Sheffield and has also worked in the Department of Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum, as curator of the Wiltshire Folklife Museum at Avebury and as a lexicographer for Longman and Oxford Dictionaries. He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Medieval Folklore and has written and lectured widely on medieval art and folklife.