What are some good sources on daily life in the Ancient Rome and medieval France & England

by Dorf_Midget

I'm interested in what the daily life was like for people of different status (peasant, merchants priest, nobles) in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe, mostly England and France but not limited to those two. Since it's such a huge (and vague) topic I'm more looking for sources in English that I could study on my own.

sunagainstgold

For the Middle Ages, I recommend starting with Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Fourteenth-Century England. He does a really good job grounding his assertions in primary sources. One of my favorite things is that he spends time on each, rather than just compiling a flyby list of rat tat tat assertions. Additionally, this is the most readable. There is an Elizabethan England volume for those of you with early modern interests as well.

Another option is the Greenwood Press Daily Life books that involve the Middle Ages. Offhand, that includes at least:

  • Daily Life in Medieval Europe
  • Daily Life during the Black Death
  • Daily Life in Chaucer's England

The quality of GP books varies somewhat by author. The medieval ones are good, if a little dry--you'll find yourself reading an archaeological excavation of a single village with as much attention to the dig as the results, which is simply not everybody's taste. The citations here are also not as thorough as Mortimer. But the books are super useful overall. There are also more specialized volumes, like Sports and Games in the Middle Ages (or something like that); I am generally much less impressed by these as they do a lot of extrapolation from very late sources with no historiographical reasoning to do so.

For children, the "You Wouldn't Want to" series is a lot of fun--You Wouldn't Want to Work on a Medieval Cathedral and You Wouldn't Want to Be Joan of Arc are clever, entertaining, and surprisingly good at portraying the weirdness and relatability of the Middle Ages at the same time.

egg_song463

Great Courses has a good lecture series called The Other Side of History by Robert Garland. I don't know the sources he used for it but it was really interesting. I remember mostly ancient civilizations, I'm not sure how much European stuff was gone over.