A Distant Mirror

"A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century", published in 1978, is a work by American historian Barbara Tuchman, focusing on life in 14th century Europe.

To provide a central figure in her sweeping narrative, Tuchman chose the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, partly because he lived a relatively long life and could therefore stay in the story during most of the 14th century. (De Coucy was born in 1340, seven years before the Black Death began in southern Italy. He died in 1397.) But he was chosen mostly because he was in the forefront of action tied, as he was, to both France and England. De Coucy was a French noble, but he married a daughter of Edward III of England.

The book covers the cataclysms suffered by Europe in the 14th century: the Hundred Years' War, the Black Plague, the papal schism, pillaging mercenaries, and popular revolts, including the Jacquerie in France, ruthlessly suppressed by de Coucy and his contemporaries, the liberation of Switzerland, the Battle of the Golden Spurs and peasant uprisings against laws that enforced the use of hops in beer. However, Tuchman does not just focus on political and religious changes. She begins her book with a discussion of the Little Ice Age, a change in climate that lowered the average temperature of Europe until the Eighteenth Century. Tuchman also takes care to describe the lives of the people, from nobles and clergymen, right down to the peasantry.

Her most central text, as it is for any historian of the century, is Jean Froissart.

Publications

* "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century"
**Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (July 12, 1987) ISBN-10: 0345349571 ISBN-13: 978-0345349576 paperback
** Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; Reissue edition (August 1978) ISBN-10: 0394400267 ISBN-13: 978-0394400266 Hardcover