The Newbury winner, Karen Cushman writes a stupendous historical fiction novel based on the medieval times using a point of view of a teenage girl who lived in the manor and suddenly moved to a bone-setters house, which she doesn't get used to soon. Later on, she becomes the apprentice of Red Peg the bone-setter. In this novel, you go through a journey of different moods such as, anger, frustration, relieved and confused and many more. The book demonstrates religious value, lack of hygiene and basic medical knowledge.
For she used to live in a manor, which is a country house owned by a wealthy person, and the person called Father Leufredus made Matilda learn his religion(, which was Christianity. The manor was very religious and thats where Matilda learnt her religious ways of living. She is made to pray 7 times a day, learning Latin and Greek, memorizing all the devils there were(, and all the saints too). She talks to saints time to time and she thinks about how they would feel her loneliness and pain. They reply her with an advice, which helps her throughout her journey. How much lack of hygiene? Well in the medieval ages, people showered once a year, not once a week nor once a month. They didn't know that when they got ill because of a disease caught by the filth on their body. Nowdays, people shower every day to keep themselves from catching disgusting diseases. I wonder how people survived in the medieval ages.
Another thing was their lack of medical knowledge. Their medical knowledge was VERY basic and in the book many had illnesses and had problems, but the main problem was that there were no-one who could cure them. The "physician", Master Theobald, reads stars and reads Latin and gives cures that "magically" seems to work, but not for Nathaniel with his poor eyesight. Master Theobald tries his urine, reads the stars but nothing could help him. This shows that they don't have much knowledge on curing people in the medieval ages.
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