4.06 AVERAGE

challenging slow-paced
dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

This was like reading a high fantasy novel with no magic or redemptive narratives. The brutal and senseless Middle Ages that comes through in this book explains why George RR Martin wrote his fantasy world the way he did, but doesn't explain anyone else's (the well-perfumed medieval world of the Kushiel's series is as far removed from this as Vulcan). I would like to see someone's fantasy treatment of the completely off-the-hook Pope vs. Anti-Pope schism that persists until the end of the book (and the century).
challenging informative slow-paced

My favorite history book ever, I think. I've bought it twice and had it given to me once; not a book I want to be without.

Very, very dense but excellent.

Wow, what an accomplishment. All of: surviving the 14th century, as the Sire de Coucy almost does; research and writing this compelling history so well as to make it a page turner, as Tuchman does; and spending two months of 2020 reading it, as I did...!
informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
informative slow-paced

I read this because sometimes when people learn that I’m a medievalist they ask me what I think of this book. There are some things that Tuchman gets right (ex. antisemitism in medieval Europe), but quite a lot more of the book is made up of poor scholarship. She has a tendency to take chroniclers at face value, for example, especially when it comes to slandering powerful women. The only time she calls these accounts into question is when they seem implausible to modern sensibilities, such as accusations of witchcraft. Similarly, she has a tendency to use a modern voice in her narration of events, which came out especially in her description of the “Turks”—the language she used was much more characteristic of 20th c orientalism than even of medieval descriptions (racist and orientalist in their own right) of Muslims. Similarly, she uses the language of the three estates to talk about medieval French AND English society, which doesn’t make sense. All of this contributes to her parroting of the progress narrative—the idea that somehow modernity is more progressive and advanced than those backwards and ignorant medieval people. She even says that something about the spirit of the 16th c reinvigorated people and ideas…without being able to point to what exactly that might have been. She completely ignores that many of the things she says were characteristic of the Middle Ages (torture, witch hunts) in fact peaked in modernity, not in the Middle Ages.  If you want a good account of medieval history, I would advise looking elsewhere.
challenging dark informative reflective

Sometimes I realize just how little history I actually know, even though I do think I have a decent broad strokes overview but, wow, this was absolutely fascinating and Tuchman's investigation into all the different things happening was just really cool.
The research and narrative structure made it work as a book rather than a textbook; I think I would have felt differently about it if I was reading for research rather than just to know more about everything. And I do finally understand what was going on with the whole "We've had one pope, yes! How about second pope?" situation.