A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries and guilty passions, Tuchman recreates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, above all, knights. The century marked the decline of the Roman Catholic Church’s power, the feudal system and the myth of the chivalrous knight. But given the amount of material that marshals in front of one’s eyes, as colorful as overwhelming pageants and breathtaking jousts, and as dense as the tightly woven wefts and warps of a tapestry, there is no way I could attempt to give a glimpse with my own words of what Barbara Tuchman has achieved with this book. Tuchman wrote this book – as the title implies – to compare the catastrophes of the 20th Century with those of the 14th.

That schism “ shook the foundations of the central institution…spreading pervasive uneasiness among the people” [1978: 36]. Most of what I've read has been deeply thought-provoking, on the one hand, if somewhat tiresome to read, on the other. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. He is like Sean Patrick Flanery in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, showing up and playing a role in a remarkable number of landmark 14th Century events.One French nobleman, the Sire de Coucy who plays a central role in the book, tried to rein them in, hanging culprits daily, but against “men habituated to lawless force punishment failed to bring the violence under control. The major players are The Black Death, The Hundred Years War, the sick, uproarious joke of chivalric valor, The Papal Schism, ruinous taxation, serfdom, petty feudal institutions, the utter absence of reason, murderous vengeance, horrendous peculation, brigandry, subjection of women, endless cruelty of mankind, crusade against the "infidel," and so on. Though I’m a bit wary that Tuchman is not a historian… I love books about Medieval times by Jacques le Goff, I’d argue that to date there was no better historian of Middle Ages than him – and Annales school of history, i. She is also the author of The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (also awarded the Pulitzer Prize), A Distant Mirror and The March of Folly.

In the years after Charles V death in 1380, France was struck by yet another series of violent revolts led by the merchant class and supported by the peasants sick of high taxes and declining incomes while the rich got richer. About only thing I knew about the 14th century when I started this book was that this was when the bubonic plague spread across Europe from Asia and I only knew this because I’ve read Connie Willis’ superb Doomsday Book in which a time-traveling historian gets stuck in 1348.I am now reading Tuchman’s The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam and I hope it will be equally good. He fought wars in his homeland of France, Italy, North Africa, Switzerland and Bulgaria, lead important diplomatic missions, twice turn The world he was born into, that is the earlier years of the 14th Century prior to his birth are studied.