![]() In Medieval Europe, the average house was comprised of a single room - the great hall - with a kitchen and a few other annexed rooms to the side.Īt the time, the private life that Bryson chronicles did not yet exist. And yet in our own homes it's this dinky room, where we just take off our shoes and hang our coats and hats."īryson discovered that the discrepancy could be traced back to the Middle Ages. ![]() ![]() "Hall of Fame, Carnegie Hall, that kind of thing. "Hall denotes important spaces in the wider world," Bryson says. Take, for instance, the long history of the hall, which Bryson refers to as "the most demoted room in the house." The idea, he tells NPR's Renee Montagne, was to treat his own home as "a universe in its own right." The result is At Home: A Short History of Private Life, a book which Bryson says uses his own house as a jumping off point to explore the general history of domesticity everywhere.īryson's research into the history of the average Western home yielded some unexpected finds - as recently as 200 years ago, the rooms of a common house might have been barely recognizable. ![]() Author Bill Bryson is known for exploring far-flung places: His previous books cover the Australian outback and the Appalachian Trail - and even the history of the universe.īut the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything found inspiration for his most recent book after a hike through his own old, Victorian house in England. ![]()
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