Replies

Best book about the plague;

A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous Fourteenth Century

Author Barbara Tuchman, circa 1978 or 1979.

Extremely well researched, she also wrote The Guns of August, circa 1961, about the origins of World War One.

I have those, uh, around here somewhere. I got the audiobook of Distant Mirror out of the library years ago and got bogged down in the description of the 100 years war warriors and their history. Probably should have bounced into some later chapter disks. Or, just ripped it into MP3 for later.

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and "furious follies," a "terrible worm in an iron cocoon."
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
by Barbara W. Tuchman (Part I) [Audiobook] | 9:09:24
RedBookNook | 4.47K subscribers | 5,391 views | October 2, 2024
00:27 .Foreword
23:38 .01 - "I Am the Sire de Coucy": The Dynasty
01:23:53 .02 - Born to Woe: The Century
02:36:44 .03 - Youth and Chivalry
03:37:38 .04 - War
04:37:04 .05 - "This Is the End of the World": The Black Death
06:17:49 .06 - The Battle of Poitiers
07:42:34 .07 - Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie