Tania Bayard has translated portions of a manual of moral
and domestic instruction written in 1393 by an elderly citizen
of Paris for his fifteen-year old wife.

THE MEDIEVAL HOME COMPANION certainly succeeds as a charming
curiosity of domestic advice from fourteenth-century France. The author, an elderly husband eager to instruct his much younger wife in all the niceties of deportment and housekeeping, offers kindly advice on subjects ranging from respectable dress to ridding the bedroom of fleas to managing servants to the proper season for planting various edibles. He even includes some of his favorite recipes for compote (using five hundred new walnuts), hippocras, four kinds of wafers and candied orange
peel.

Illustrating the text are reproductions of forty medieval
woodcuts depicting such daily tasks as grinding spices, caring
for the sick and bargaining with a merchant.

A reader unfamiliar with the Middle Ages will certainly gain
a feel for the daily lives and responsibilities of householders.
The author, a prosperous citizen with wide-ranging knowledge,
obviously dotes on his young wife, and desires to teach her how
to not only please him, but also to please a second husband, a
likely possibility given the gap in their ages.

Beyond the charm of the book, however, lies little of value
to more informed readers. Bayard has only chosen to include
less than one-fourth of the original text, admittedly omitting
lengthy discussions about chastity, worship, and honor. While
this decision was made to make the book more approachable to
twentieth-century readers, it not only undermines the scholarly
usefulness of the text, but also the broad picture of medieval
life it purports to convey. ( )

This small volume comprises selections from a middle-aged Frenchman's instructions to his much younger bride on a wide range of topics, most of which guide the practical matters of running a medieval household. The gentleman's devotion to detail, and the time he apparently spent preparing these written instructions, is impressive. I would be interested in reading a translation of the full text. ( )

I thought this was going to be one of those "written by a historian, this is what life was like way back when" books. In fact, it's an actual housekeeping guide written by a 15th-century French guy and edited and translated by Tania Bayard. I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had known. But it is a good illustration of both medieval housekeeping and the medieval mindset, and valuable to people researching the period. ( )

If you're interested in what a young woman married off to an older man in the 14th century was expected to do then this is a great read. I found this book a fascinating look into a history of normal people rather than the normal look at history through major events. ( )

Abridged translation of Le Menagier de Paris.