The Remote Mirror: The Damning 14th Century

Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) was an American writer and historian. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, she is the author of "Guns of August" and "The March of Folly." The 14th century was a turning point. One of the darkest and most mysterious centuries not only in French but in European history. The time of the "Avignon Papacy," the Hundred Years' War, the pandemic of the "Black Death," which claimed the lives of a third of Europe's population, the short and bloody Jacquerie, and the flourishing of many bizarre heresies. A time of violence and lawlessness, hunger and devastation, disbelief and despair. Yet life goes on even in the darkest times… Before the reader is a unique book, in which the author transforms the history of the de Cusis family into a peculiar mirror reflecting the very history of the 14th century…