HOW TO BEHAVE BADLY IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

Sub-titled 'A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves and Braggarts' we enter a rowdy street gang scouring a tavern. Gentlewomen hold insolent eye contact. Drunkards wag dirty fingers at the dinner table. Every age and social strata has its rule-breakers and nose-thumbers, but Elizabethan England perhaps had more than its fair share. Ruth Goodman takes us into raucous troublemaking times illuminating the Elizabethan era. She cheerfully embraces the naughty bits of the 16th and 17th centuries, having researched advice manuals, court cases and sermons offering a veritable how-to guide for both the cheeky and the downright cunning. Find out why nose-blowing was disgusting while spitting was acceptable, while curses hurled at women were almost always about sex. This was a time that a new 'brand of religion and non-religion' was born - democracy was evolving in areas such as voting, representation and taxation, and a linguistic evolution spread through the streets and on the page. Here is the nitty gritty of daily life for merchants, street sellers and others, 1550-1660 Stuart and Tudor England, including offensive speech and gestures, the perverse delights of mockery and ridicule, the ripostes of physical violence, and a gallery of repellent habits and repulsive displays of bodily functions like 'a turd in your teeth'. Please be aware that we have in stock the American edition of a book first published in Britain under the title 'How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain.' 314pp, charming woodcut illus. Remainder mark.