A Distant Mirror
The Calamitous 14th Century
by Barbara Tuchman
Published By: Random House in 1978
Genre: Nonfiction | History & Culture
Page Count: 784 (Paperback)
Audiobook Length: 28 hours and 38 minutes
Audiobook Narrator: Wanda McCaddon
ISBN: 9780345349576
Publisher’s 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; and how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serfs, nobles, 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
About the Author
Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian celebrated for her masterful narrative histories, including “The Guns of August,” which examined the outbreak of World War I with insightful analysis and captivating prose.
Click here for the full biography.