This book is an amazing work of scholarship. What I got, however, was a tour de force. I initially purchased this book as a result of my budding interest in the bubonic plague and the devestation it brought to Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. More like this, please, Audible.Īnd you thought the twentieth century was rough. I dearly wish, now, there was a volume from Tuchman to take us into the of the renaissance and the reformation. It turns what starts out seeming dry into something thrilling and absorbing.
It's a clever device, and an effective retelling of Froissart's chronicles in the light of what we now know. Somehow, de Coucy, the existence of whom I'm pretty sure nobody learned during their school history lessons, happened to be present, sometimes on the English side, latterly on the French, at almost all of the events you did hear about. Essentially, it tracks the career of one French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy, against the wider tapestry of the period of the black death of the papal schism and of the hundred years war. However, I found the book rewarding of the extended attention. So be aware of what you're lettting yourself in for. When you buy this, you're signing up for (if you download the richest format) 4 100MB downloads, read by a lady with a middle class English accent and of a certain age. Worth the investment of both time and money Here are proud cardinals, beggars, feminists, university scholars, grocers, bankers, mercenaries, mystics, lawyers and tax collectors, and, dominating all, the knight in his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Here are the guilty passions, loyalties and treacheries, political assassinations, sea battles and sieges, corruption in high places and a yearning for reform, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, and lust and sadism on the stage. The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and the exquisitely decorated Books of Hours and on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.īarbara Tuchman reveals both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived. *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal 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
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