Title:
A distant mirror : the calamitous 14th century / Barbara W. Tuchman.
ISBN:
9780345349576
9781439558577
Personal Author:
Edition:
Random House trade paperback edition.
Publication Information:
New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, [2014]
©1978
Physical Description:
xxvii, 714 pages, 28 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 21 cm
General Note:
Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1978.
Contents:
"I am the Sire de Coucy": The dynasty -- Born to woe: The century -- Youth and chivalry -- War -- "This is the end of the world": The Black Death -- The Battle of Poitiers -- Decapitated France: The Bourgeois rising and the Jacquerie -- Hostage in England -- Enguerrand and Isabella -- Sons of iniquity -- The gilded shroud -- Double allegiance -- Coucy's war -- England's turmoil -- The emperor in Paris -- The papal schism -- Coucy's rise -- The worms of the earth against the lions -- The lure of Italy -- A second Norman conquest -- The fiction cracks -- The siege of Barbary -- In a dark wood -- Danse macabre -- Lost opportunity -- Nicopolis -- Hung be the heavens with black.
Summary:
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. Barbara 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."
Personal Subject:
OCLC Number:
ocn905986995
Availability:
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