[close] The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: on the one hand a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry and exquisitely illuminated Books of Hours; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony —a world plunged into chaos.

Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing to us both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Here are guilty passions; loyalties and treacheries; political assassinations; sea battles and sieges; fear of the end of the world; corruption in high places and a yearning for reform; satire and humor; sorcery and demonology; lust and sadism on the stage. Here are proud cardinals, beggars, bailiffs, feminists, Jews, scholars of the university, grocers, bankers, clerks, sorcerers, mercenaries, saints and mystics, lawyers and tax-collectors, and, dominating all, the knight in his valor and "furious follies," a "terrible worm in an iron cocoon."

"Wise, witty, and wonderful... A great book, in a great historical tradition."
David Herbert Donald, COMMENTARY

"Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship... What Mrs. Tuchman does superbly is to tell bow it was... No one has ever done this better."
Lawrence Stone.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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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. [close]