Medieval Time Travel

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century: it's a highly readable, very well-documented, and detailed look at life in an amazingly turbulent time. In many ways, it's amazing that humans survived.

I enjoyed this book, and can heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the "simpler days" of medieval Europe (don't send me!).

In his "Envoi," Mr. Mortimer makes the argument that history can do more than just examine evidence. As he puts it,
History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past--to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.(p.292)
While I admire his imaginative use of historical, literary, and other documentary evidence (oops, there's that word!) in building a deeper understanding of life in the 14th century, I remain unconvinced that we can imaginatively time travel, to see (as he suggests) Chaucer still alive, describing the fair, recently-deceased duchess to an audience of friends. We are as rooted to our time, as the denizens of medieval England were rooted to theirs.

While we can enlist our sympathetic imagination to try to understand our departed forbears, we cannot leave our frame of reference. Mr. Mortimer writes:
"Men are gathered around [Chaucer], listening as he describes the woman, her smiling laughter, so fresh and fair and free. They can tell he still feels the sadness of her death. What they hear is what we hear." (p. 292)
Perhaps we have similar frames of reference for the experience of losing dear friends (or the death of friends-of-friends), but there are barriers between us and those listeners. Differing religious understandings (deeply rooted medieval piety vs. twentyfirst century skepticism), differing expectations for relationships between genders... these are just two areas from a host of cultural obstacles that would need to be recognized to really be able to step out of ourselves and hear "what they hear."

In the end, I think Mr. Mortimer is calling for a literary understanding of history. In his approach, one engages sympathetic imagination and couples it with a desire for reaching out to fellow humans along the journey of life. His final sentence shows this fundamental perspective. And although I incline more to Mr. Jenkins ("We can never really know the past... the gap between the past and history... is such that no amount of epistemological effort can bridge it" p. 311 n.1), it is an engaging approach:
At the very least you will hear some good stories.