A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
by Barbara W. Tuchman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barbara W. TuchmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-07-12
ISBN: 0345349571
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Product features:
- Paperback with mideaval scene. 677 pages
Book Reviews of A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Book Review: Thorough, Detailed, Riveting
Summary: 5 Stars
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."
Summary of A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." CommentaryThe 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.
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.
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