A distant mirror: the calamitous 14th century, paperback/barbara w. tuchman

Barbara W.

Tuchman--the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic The Guns of August --once again marshals her gift for character, history, and sparkling prose to compose an astonishing portrait of medieval Europe.

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.