A nicely written piece of historical fantasy, in the spirit of Game of Thrones. Her late 14th century English commoners live to their late fifties despite three large waves of bubonic plague and staggering death rate at childbirth, eat hi-protein diets straight from a London supermarket, understand the connection between infection and bodily hygiene and some even have indoor plumbing. Did I forget domestic servants saving to buy stone houses? Strict enforcement of municipal edicts in an almost illiterate society? She herself mentions that an ability to read a psalm by heart was considered a sufficient evidence of clerical vocation. Barker announces an entirely different popular image of the Middle Ages "a nineteenth-century invention."
There is little explanation how this squares with (a well-documented) meager yields of crops (1:3-1:5) in Medieval England and other mainstream economic histories. If there was such a disparity in the living conditions between Late Medieval British Isles and the rest of the world (including lands with much more temperate climes), what is the particular reason?
Her book can be read as a page-turning novel but given her fast and loose treatment of facts (an army of 36,000 French facing 6,000 English at Agincourt based on a single line of pro-British historian) I cannot say how accurate it is.
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The connection between hygiene and infection was not firmly established before the end of XIX century despite a microbial hypothesis of infection in existence since Erasistratus of Ceos and Hierophilus of Chalcedon. However, in the Late Middle Ages, the opposite theory, namely that water ablutions cause disease had its day, probably because of the most obvious connection between public baths and syphilis. Even discovery of microorganisms by Lewenhoek did not promote microbial hypothesis to the status of theory. Only the emergence of biostatistics in XIX century as well as the experimentation by Pasteur and Koch finally put humoral theory of disease to rest.
The ignorance of English humanities' scholars of natural sciences is flabbergasting (see my reviews of forays into psychiatry by British scholar, Andrew Scull). Even dismissing plague epidemics, the premature mortality in the Middle Ages was enormous. Did Juliet ever realize that the agricultural labor led to frequent bruises and trauma, frequently lethal because of tetanus and bacterial infections? To this one must add meager diets (scurvy and pellagra), filthy water, in which refuse, animal carcasses and human bodies were dumped, and tuberculosis and leprosy--not particularly infectious, luckily, which proliferated in the conditions of overcrowding and poor hygiene.
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