A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th CenturyA “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 NOTE: This edition does not include color images. |
Contents
3 | |
24 | |
Youth and Chivalry | 49 |
War | 70 |
This Is the End of the World The Black Death | 92 |
The Battle of Poitiers | 126 |
The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie | 155 |
Hostage in England | 185 |
The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions | 365 |
The Lure of Italy | 398 |
A Second Norman Conquest | 416 |
The Fiction Cracks | 438 |
The Siege of Barbary | 458 |
In a Dark Wood | 478 |
Danse Macabre | 494 |
Lost Opportunity 5 17 | 517 |
Enguerrand and Isabella | 204 |
Sons of Iniquity | 222 |
The Gilded Shroud | 232 |
Double Allegiance | 246 |
Coucys War | 269 |
Englands Turmoil | 284 |
The Emperor in Paris | 306 |
The Papal Schism | 320 |
Part Two 17 Coucys Rise | 343 |
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Common terms and phrases
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