A Distant Mirror

**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***