A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
TUCHMAN, Barbara W.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
First Edition of Barbara Tuchman's The Distant Mirror; Signed by Her
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
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Item Number: 78026
First edition of this “beautiful, extraordinary book” (The Wall Street Journal). Octavo, original cloth, cartographic endpapers, illustrated. Signed by Barbara Tuchman on the title page. Near fine in a very good dust jacket.
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.” “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).
