
A Distant Mirror
The Calamitous 14th Century
1978 · 704 pages
Tuchman holds the fourteenth century up as a mirror to our own: plague killing a third of Europe, a war without end, and one French nobleman whose life ran through all of it.
★ 6.8

Tuchman holds the fourteenth century up as a mirror to our own: plague killing a third of Europe, a war without end, and one French nobleman whose life ran through all of it.

Ten young Florentines flee the plague to a country house and spend ten days telling a hundred stories of seduced wives, crooked friars, and lucky fools. The jokes still land six centuries later.