A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Barbara W. Tuchman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 9196
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 704
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0345349571
Dewey Decimal Number: 944.025
EAN: 9780345349576
ASIN: 0345349571
Publication Date: July 12, 1987
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Condition: Some shelf wear. Cover shows wear. Light moisture damage. Shows wear. Orders shipped within 1 business day.
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Amazon.com
In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors.
Product Description
"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." Commentary
The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 A Distant Mirror August 30, 2008
Barbra Tuchman's A Distant Mirror is an excellent narrative history of the period, highly readable, and thoroughly researched. Cast as an extended biography of a singular figure whose life almost exactly bracketed a tumultous period in the history of Europe, the book examines the social, military, religious, economic and medical fabric of one of the pivotal periods of western civilization. Dr. Tuchman's books are always accurate and accessible, providing hours of reading pleasure, but A Distant Mirror is, perhaps, the best of her works. Here one gets as fullsome a portrait of a remarkable man as it is possible to imagine, given the passage of almost 700 years. Although the book is advertised as a history of the entire 14th century, the work concentrates on the latter two-thirds of the century because that period more nearly coincides with the life of Engeurrand de'Coucy and because most of the important events of the century occurred during that time frame.
I read A Distant Mirror twice during 1978 and 1984. Recently I was moved to read the book again and was perhaps even more impressed with the third reading.
Black Plague and other medieval occurances -- Great! August 30, 2008
Barbara Tuchman's history of medieval times is fascinating and really thorough -- what it must have been really like. Better from afar -- it would seem. Great book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
 A good, but not great, book August 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tuchman builds a wonderful mental picture of the 14th century, and what it must have been like to live back then. She follows the 14th century through the life of a French nobleman (but not a king). This led to a book that isn't a great story - she purposely picks someone who has some historical info, but not a king or queen whose life would be too far removed from the "common" life. Unfortunately, that means there isn't a lot of detail about this guy's life, and she is too much of a historian to make anything up. So the story is kind of sketchy. And (this is probably endemic in any 14th century booK) she spends a lot of time talking about relationships between royalty across Europe, which for some reason bores me silly. All that said, I have a completely different view of medieval Farnce and England than previously, and I learned a lot. A worthwhile read that sometimes bogs down.
Thorough, Detailed, Riveting July 14, 2008
Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror is a study of European Medieval history centered on the Black Death (1348-50) and encompassing the period between 1300 and approximately 1450. Written from the narrative perspective, she follows the life of one Enguerrand de Coucy VII (1340-97), a member of the senior nobility of France whose barony in the center of Picardy was the largest in France and who took part in nearly every major French exploit of his time. He was also the patron of Jean Froissart, the preeminent chronicler of the time, whose works have been preserved in history, and thus much is known about Enguerrand de Coucy that might otherwise have been lost in antiquity. Tuchman chose to base her study of this period on a known person of the period in order to ground her study in factual occurrences, and this she accomplishes to a marvelous degree. Through nearly six hundred pages of thoroughly researched material, she takes the reader from the founding of the Coucy dynasty, through the debacle at Poitiers, the Black Death, the various campaigns of England to capture the crown of France, the Great Schism of the catholic church, French pretensions in Italy, the Siege of Barbary, and the greatest debacle at the close of the 14th century, the Battle of Nicopolis, which, though it was a severe loss to French and European forces nevertheless served to check Islamic advance into Europe. Throughout her narration of this history, she presents key aspects of life during this period, describing the livelihood of the peasantry, of the bourgeoisie, of Medieval economy and medicine and religion; of military tactics and the flow of political currents throughout Europe (as centered about France); and generally describing domestic life of the great and the humble. Her recounting of the entrance of the Black Death and its subsequent reappearances over a fifty year period are especially riveting, as she exposes detail after detail of the effects of population reduction on farming, tax revenue, society, marriage, art, politics, religion, and more. We read of entire priories and monasteries reduced to empty stone halls; of the village or city accountant records describing in woeful detail declining revenue from this or that parish; or of villages that slowly crumble and return to the wilderness as its inhabitants die out to every last man woman and child. It is harrowing in detail.
The depth of detail that Tuchman brings to her study is enormous and extracted from countless trips to libraries, city archives, and church records throughout France, England, and other countries. Tuchman also uses first and second person narrative in presenting conversations that occurred in this period, using these as taken from the chroniclers of the period. Such conversations are not, of course, to be taken literally, and Tuchman qualifies such presentations at the outset. Yet Tuchman understands the inherent value of such presentations in providing the reader with a sense of mood and choreography of the time. Readers of ancient literature will be familiar with this approach, for it was common in ancient times to present what were little more than fabricated conversations among historical persons, which were presented less as exact and factual recollections of such conversations but more provided to convey the sense of impact, mood and impression that the actual conversation likely had. Pericles' funeral oration, as presented by Thucydides, is a good example of this from ancient history. Tuchman brings the chroniclers into her study for similar reasons, writing as she does not for rigorous historians but for the lay reader interested in this period of European history. Truly, this book finds a competent middle ground, in that it exposes the reader to countless factual elements of Medieval history, while still adhering to her vision that "...the writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research."
Tuchman brought to her development of A Distant Mirror considerable previous experience as a journalist, writer, and historian. Born into a prominent family with significant international experience - for example, her grandfather Henry Morgenthau Sr. was President Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Turkey in 1913 and who wrote numerous papers and articles on political events of the time - Tuchman had already written twelve books on various historical topics, two of which received significant literary recognition and to have been awarded Pulitzer prizes - The Proud Tower (1968) and Sand Against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (1971). Such was the recognition of her talent that she received honorary doctorates in literature from Yale, Columbia, Bates, New York University, Williams, and Smith. She was nominated and admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected president of the Academy in 1978, which awarded her the Gold Medal for History in 1978. She also received international recognition for her literary talent through her induction into the Order of Leopold, first class. Yet, for all her academic and literary recognition, Tuchman was still a grounded individual. When her husband expressed concern about bringing children into a world torn by WWII, Tuchman recounted that "Sensible for once, I argued that if we waited for the outlook to improve, we might wait forever, and that if we wanted a child at all we should have it now, regardless of Hitler," noting that, "The tyranny of men not being quite as total as today's feminists would have us believe, our first daughter was born nine months later." Her groundedness was evident in the approach she took in conducting historical research. Not content to spend hours whiling away in libraries, she toured the sites associated with her historical studies, such as the sites of land battles in her book, The Guns of August, even following the invasion routes that German armies took through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Northern France on route to Paris, taking notes on 4x6 note cards that she stored in shoeboxes. Later, in recounting her lack of academic title or degree, she noted that "It's what saved me. If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity."
A Distant Mirror is a masterpiece of fact and narrative of Medieval history, accomplishing, in Tuchman's summary of the historical process, "a sense of history as accidental and perhaps cyclical, of human conduct as a steady stream running through endless fields of changing circumstances, of good and bad always coexisting and inextricably mixed in periods as in people, of cross-currents and counter-currents usually present to contradict too-easy generalizations."
Gripping retelling of a bygone, horrific age February 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Barbara Tuchman may have labored under the title, "amateur historian," but her work "A Distant Mirror" is a must-read classic for ivory tower academics as well as casual fans of the Middle Ages alike. She may not have written for the professors of the world, but her insight and writing ability set her apart from so many "professional" historians.
"ADM" focuses on the 14th century, which had so many trials and tribulations (such as the Black Plague, the Hundred Years' War, and papal schisms, to name a couple) that one wonders how anyone survived. Tuchman uses the life of Enguerrand de Coucy (a French nobleman who married the daughter of England's King Edward III, who brought victory in France to the English) to frame her story, but she leaves no stone unturned as she tells the stories of high-and-low-born alike.
This is one of those rare history books that one can read for pleasure as well as edification. Copiously researched, "ADM" still never loses its narrative power as Tuchman moves from event to event. Far too often, the Middle Ages seem as distant as the Bronze Age, but Tuchman brings the 14th century to life as few historians ever have. She conveys the feeling of desperation the peasantry felt during the times when the mercenaries ran rampant among them as well as the various troubles that weighed down the heads of so many nobles, priests, and warlords.
Without belaboring the point, Tuchman conveys the harsh realities of a world where the religious and secular leaders are engaged in a ruthless power struggle. Always willing to be charitable and to find goodness where it (all too rarely) could be found, Tuchman's history is balanced yet critical.
Yes, this is a rave review. Discount it if your wish, but I have drunk the Kool-Aid. I strongly urge you to get this book and do the same.
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