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.\ Praise for A Distant Mirror \ 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 \ A beautiful extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.\ --The Wall Street Journal \ Wise witty and wonderful . . . a great book in a great historical tradition.\ --Commentary