A Distant Mirror

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