Title: A Distant Mirror Pdf The Calamitous 14th Century
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.
Dry I have been trying to plow through this for the last few weeks, and can only read a few pages at a time before my eyes glaze over. English and French history is my key period, though I've mostly focused on the Wars of the Roses and subsequent events up to Napoleon. So I thought this would be an interesting peek at an era I'm not too familiar with. However, I'm a little past halfway, and all of a sudden the author throws in big sections written in present tense, which is jarring; the section on the plague basically just repeats itself over and over, giving statistics and names of villages that were defunct after the plague...I can remember trying to read this when it was first published but didn't really have a memory of it - so I started it again, and failed. I officially gave up this morning and am going to go read something else, more invigorating.Headlong into Confusion This book is another Barbara Tuchman tour de force, displaying the rich pageant of 14th century France amid the tumult of plague, war, and political destabilization.14th century France managed to combine possibly the worst of all possible outcomes. After the political and military triumphs of Philip the Fair (IV) in the early years of the century, a lengthy period of dynastic uncertainty continued throughout the period, with only the reign of Charles V to demonstrate rare competence in government.France, probably more than any other, was a prisoner of chivalry as the Middle Ages waned. This meant that knightly valor overwhelmed simple good sense as demonstrated again and again and again during four spectacular military disasters, Crecy, Poitiers, Nicopolis and Agincourt. In each case the French were overwhelmed by the failure of their own tactics and an inability to understand the need to sacrifice glory, the knight's prerogative for the expediency of developing formations and tactics that could respond to superior English long bows and superior Turkish tactics. The Hundred Years lasted as long as it did due an insistence of the French nobility on fighting as its enemy preferred it to fight, rather than in a way likely to ensure victory.Tuchman uses the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy as the prism to view the century's disasters. His father died at Crecy, he died after Nicopolis in Turkish hands. In between he married a daughter of Edward III, served the realm in diplomatic and military capacities and survived the plague that decimated Europe.It is appropriate for Tuchman to use a member of the nobility as her "every man" as this is the class that had the greatest impact on French and English history during this period. This impact was not necessarily a positive one, with rebellions and treason being more routine than bathing. Moral guidelines are generally absent with the Catholic Church torn by the spectacle of two, sometimes three, popes during the great schism. While the Kings were sometimes mad, the nobility was generally bad.This is a marvelous book which I forgot just how good it was, having last picked it up in 1979. The 14th century is a place worth encountering through Tuchman's prose.“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Possibly the best of Barbara Tuchman's award winning and other excellent books. Her sweep of history anchored in detailed "stories" is incredible. Required reading to understand that history does repeat itself as "follies" repeatedly occur even in the post Vietnam period like 2017. If she were alive today, she would have us reexamining our decades of war in Iraq & Afghanistan as well as the Trump presidency.
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