The Secret Middle Ages

The Secret Middle Ages reconstructs everyday medieval culture through the objects and images encountered by ordinary people between 1200 and 1550. Malcolm Jones draws on little-known and recently discovered artefacts, looking beyond courtly and ecclesiastical art to the visual world of the wider population.

Jewellery, tableware, illustrations, carvings and textiles reveal attitudes towards love, hatred, crime and punishment, proverbs, imagined earthly paradise and domestic conflict. Medieval beliefs and traditions emerge through the creative imagery attached to practical and decorative objects, offering a less familiar view of the period’s social imagination. Rather than presenting the Middle Ages solely through religion, monarchy or warfare, Jones considers the popular and folk art that preserved everyday concerns and contradictions.