A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

This vivid panorama – revealing the extraordinary world of western Europe between 1300 and 1450 in evocative portrait and telling detail – has been acclaimed as Barbara Tuchman’s finest achievement.

In these eminently readable and quite compelling pages, she brings the insights of a modern historian to bear on the decades that Chaucer and Boccaccio knew, the time of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, of the great fame of Dante and the subversive legendry of Robin Hood, of extravagant civilisation and bizarre superstition, of pilgrimage and plague, of revolutionary new technologies and enraged revolt against a poll tax.

Barbara Tuchman’s international bestseller is indeed A Distant Mirror that subtly evokes astonishing parallels between those turbulent times and our own ominous decades.