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