Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (2008)
A Brief But Unvarnished Summary: Twenty-one soliloquies, most in poetic form, depicting various events in twenty-one lives in a medieval village. A Less Brief, But Still Unvarnished Response: This is a book of poems. However, I unabashedly loved it. The medieval period, I feel, is often misunderstood by the casual student. (There's knights, right? and...people were dirty?) But this gives you a taste of everything about the period, with handy sidebars of explanation and longer, two page essays if a subject requires a little more. Better still, it puts the facts into lives. When told, for example, that the lord had rights over his peasants's property, it doesn't have the same impact as when you read Mogg's story about the time her father died and the lord came to take their best animal in payment. It's one thing to know that women died in childbirth - and that they were giving birth near constantly - but it's another thing entirely to hear Barbary worry about her stepmother giving birth to a second set of twins when the first one almost killed her. Fiction is good for many things, but my favorite application is this: bringing life to a world that is otherwise dead boring. The archives will make obvious that I'm not a great judge of poetry, so I'll only comment that the form did not get in the way of the stories and at times obviously enhanced them. That's the highest compliment I feel qualified to give. DIHaPoMHCB?: Shoosh yeah! I'll stick it next to Catherine Called Birdy and Adam of the Road but we can read it aloud before they can read either of those. Current Score: 83/92 -A.J.S.














