The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Quotes

“All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Oscar Wilde once quipped, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal—some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father’s estates, not the younger—so why should men and women be treated equally?”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“In Elizabethan England you will only find small codpieces. Large ones, stuffed with wool and looking like an erect male member, are out of date”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The historian is always a middleman: the facilitator of the reader’s understanding of the past.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“But in the sixteenth century some individuals do change the course of society.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“If it is a fish day you may be served sturgeon, porpoise, or seal.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Even steering a boat can be dangerous. In heavy seas it might take six or seven men to control the tiller of a very large vessel, and they have to do this below deck, without being able to see the sea and the sky. You will not find a ship’s wheel anywhere—it has not been invented yet.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Thus the Elizabethan character is an amalgam of rashness, boldness, resolution, and violence—all mixed in a heady brew of destructive intolerance.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“there is a profound frustration at the Church’s refusal to change its views.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The question is very much a sixteenth-century one. Prior to the Reformation there is no discussion about the existence of God. Not believing in God is like not believing in trees. Most people simply cannot conceive of a line dividing the metaphysical and the physical.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The larger provincial towns and cities in particular are dominated by a few merchant families who own virtually all the wealth. In Exeter, for instance, 2 percent of the population own 40 percent of the taxable property, and just 7 percent own two-thirds of it.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Foresight,”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The last few decades have seen so much change that people simply do not know what to believe or think anymore. They have become used to living with slow-burning crises that might, at any moment, flare up into life-threatening situations.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The problem is that our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“At Eton boys are woken at 5 a.m.; lessons begin at 6 a.m. and go on to 8 p.m. Teaching is generally in Latin and is a matter of learning by rote,”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The London physician Simon Forman makes a list of seventy diseases that occur in women and not in men and states that they are a punishment for Eve tempting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“You may think it extraordinary that a monarch can stop the majority of the nation believing in Purgatory and transubstantiation and yet cannot persuade people to use a standard system of weights and measures—but there you are.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Some well-educated people simply can’t “think” in Arabic numbers: Sir William Cecil translates all the figures supplied to him in Arabic back into Roman numerals when forming government policy.13”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England