A Distant Mirror The Calamitous 14th Century

A marvelous history * of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years War, by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Guns of August
 
*Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal
 
The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight in all his valor and furious follies, a terrible worm in an iron cocoon.
 
Praise for A Distant Mirror
 
Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better. The New York Review of Books
 
A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer. The Wall Street Journal
 
Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition. Commentary