A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
A narrative history of 14th-century Europe — the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the papal schism, peasant revolts — told through the life of one French nobleman, Enguerrand VII de Coucy. Tuchman frames the century as a "distant mirror" held up to the calamities of the 20th.
A third of the way in, the plague has come and gone and Poitiers is already fought, so the back half trails Enguerrand de Coucy through campaigns nobody remembers, 784 pages that spend their famous material early. "Dry, dry dry. Swallowed in minutiae," one detractor writes, and the minutiae arrive with a cast of hundreds: "There are so many names of places and people! it is hard to keep everything straight." The medievalists were no kinder, one calling it a "curiously dated and old-fashioned work," its mirror between the 14th century and the 20th bolted on from 1970s America. Even readers who finish (and plenty admit that took some doing) come out cold: "I should have loved it much more than I did."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
