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