A Distant Mirror

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman proves her talent for seeking out characters at all levels of society in this beautifully repackaged and reissued edition of her grand portrait of 14th-century Europe.

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.

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 valour 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