A Distant Mirror by Barbara W Tuchman

A Distant Mirror by Barbara W Tuchman

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

Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China won her international fame.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780345349576
ISBN 10	0345349571
Title	A Distant Mirror
Author	Barbara W Tuchman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1987-07-12
Number of pages	784
Prizes	Winner of National Book Awards 1980
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.