This month’s best historical reads

By Ruth Goodman

ILLUSTRATION FROM LONDON IN THE TIME OF THE TUDORS BY SIR WALTER BESANT/LONDON/1904 X1, WOODCUT FROM THE ROXBURGHE BALLADS/EDITED BY J. WOODFALL EBSWORTH/

How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain

Michael O’Mara Books, £20, hardback, 320 pages

As her appearances on TV series including the BBC’s Victorian Farm demonstrate, historian and writer Ruth Goodman is committed to recreating life as it would really have been lived by our forebears. In this book, she focuses her attention on the bawdier side of life in the 16th and 17th centuries, asking what we’d find shocking if we were somehow able to travel back to the Tudor and Stuart eras. From ill manners to indecent behaviour, this entertaining look at misdemeanours and their perpetrators tells us much about wider society in Britain 400 years ago.

“Ruth asks what we’d find shocking if we were somehow able to travel back to the Tudor and Stuart eras”

BOOK OF THE MONTH

Emasculated men were often pictured as having horns

PHOTO: MARK GOODMAN

Gossiping was as impolite then as it is now, but it was historically seen as a female vice

MEET THE AUTHOR

What’s the best insult a Tudor could muster? Social historian Ruth Goodman explores the way our perceptions of bad behaviour have changed – though, sometimes, not by much