Overview

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."" ""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

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9781664496613

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Reviews

""A beautiful, extraordinary book...Tuchman at the top of her powers...She has done nothing finer."" -- ""Wall Street Journal"" ""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."" -- ""New York Review of Books"" ""Wise, witty, and wonderful...A great book, in a great historical tradition."" -- ""Commentary""

Author Information

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989) was a self-trained historian and author who achieved prominence with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She received her BA degree from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo from 1934 to 1935. She then began working as a journalist and contributed to publications including The Nation, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Her other books, include The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, The First Salute, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45, also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the US government's highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

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