How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life

From an historian who advised on the BBC’s Wolf Hall, an erudite romp through the intimate details of life in Tudor England.

On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as our intrepid guide to sixteenth-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era. From sounding the “hue and cry” to alert a village to danger to malting grain for homemade ale, from the gruesome sport of bear-baiting to cuckolding and cross-dressing―the madcap habits and revealing intimacies of life in the time of Shakespeare are vividly rendered for the insatiably curious.

8 pages of color illustrations

Ruth Goodman is the author of multiple books including How to Be a Victorian. An historian of British life, she has presented a number of BBC television series, including Tudor Monastery Farm. She lives in the United Kingdom.