But it was an incredibly violent world, where invading armies killed everyone, where women and children were routinely hacked to death, where pregnant women were eviscerated for sport. It was a religious world most people went to church at least once a day. 'The fourteenth century was a vanished world, and a dangerous one. You were a leaf that didn't know it was a part of a tree.'ģ. Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. Studying history was as pointless as learning Morse Code, or how to drive a horse-drawn wagon. The modern world was compelling and new, and the past had no bearing on it. Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored. 'He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials - people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. Oh, and I actually enjoyed the movie adaptation a lot!Ĥ. Chivalry, Crichton contends, was dead back then, too. What I found myself enjoying fifteen years later was the grim, disenchanted medieval world that Crichton depicts: plague, ruthless warlords, deviant seductresses, powerless and victimized common folk, civil war - thematically, the novel works for me best at these moments in which the grad students, Marek especially, encounter the disconnect between his modern assumptions and the world of Castelgard. I remember looking at the cover with a bit of suspicion at first, in part because my dad-a notorious non-reader in the family-picked it up and found himself unable to put it down. But I gave it a go anyways, myself in love with Robin Hood, dark castles, dragons - and the time-travel element of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It was my introduction to Michael Crichton, the old worn paperback a gift from a family friend who'd come to stay with us for a week.

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