
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.

Chaucer's thirty pilgrims ride to Canterbury swapping stories, the knight a courtly romance and the miller a filthy joke, and he wrote them in English when serious poetry meant Latin or French.