| A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Contributor(s): Tuchman, Barbara W. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0345349571 ISBN-13: 9780345349576 Publisher: Random House Trade OUR PRICE: $19.80 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: July 1987 Annotation: "Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." Commentary The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - Medieval - History | Social History - History | Western Europe - General |
| Dewey: 944 |
| Physical Information: 1.7" H x 5.5" W x 8.2" (1.35 lbs) 784 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - Medieval (500-1453) |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 |