A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

First Edition of Barbara Tuchman's The Distant Mirror; Signed by Her

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

TUCHMAN, Barbara W.

Item Number: 78026

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

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).

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