Full name: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman Year: 1978 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Award winners Culture: France Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon OpenLibrary Barns&Noble Google Books eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780345349576 0345349571

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 '€œfurious follies,'€ a '€œterrible worm in an iron cocoon.'€ Praise for A Distant Mirror '€œBeautifully 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 '€œA beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.'€'€”The Wall Street Journal '€œWise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.'€'€”Commentary NOTE: This edition does not include color images. Similar books: Stillwell and the American Experience in China by Barbara W. Tuchman Life in a Medieval City by Joseph Gies Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill The Black Death by Philip Ziegler The Birth of the West by Paul Collins The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor The Making of the Middle Ages by R. W. Southern Medieval Civilization by Jacques Le Goff Medieval People by Eileen Power The Barbarian West by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph Gies Froissart's Chronicles by Jean Froissart The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame by Michael Camille Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont The Occitan War by Laurence W. Marvin