A Distant Mirror (First Edition, First Printing)

Tuchman, Barbara

ISBN 10: 0394400267 / ISBN 13: 9780394400266

Published by Knopf, 1978

About this Item

First Edition, First Printing of Barbara Tuchman's classic portrait of Europe in the 14th century -- an era of armed conflict, plague, the danse macbre, competing popes, and Joan of Arc. 677 pages, cloth, illustrated. The book has a bit of foxing of the page edges and a bit of edge wear. The dust jacket has edge wear.

Seller Inventory # 014886

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Distant Mirror (First Edition, First Printing)
• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394400267
• ISBN 13: 9780394400266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good+
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

The prize-winning historian traces the major currents of the fourteenth century, revealing the century's great historical rhythms and events and the texture of daily life at all levels of European society

Review

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.