Distant Mirror

<b>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 <i>The Guns of August</i></b> <p/><b>*Lawrence Wright author of <i>The End of October </i>in<i> The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br> <b><i> </i></b><br> 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. <p/> <b>Praise for <i>A Distant Mirror</i></b> <p/> Beautifully written careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell <i>how </i>it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.<b>--<i>The New York Review of Books</i></b><br> <i> </i><br> A beautiful extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.<b>--<i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br> <i> </i><br> Wise witty and wonderful . . . a great book in a great historical tradition.<b><i>--Commentary</i></b>