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aerdna 's review for:
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
by Barbara W. Tuchman
A Distant Mirror made me think a bit about the distinction between textbook and nonfiction, because this stack of solid research surely blurred the distinction. I have a lot of empathy for her task here- tackling something in a scholarly way, but also retaining the human interest factor can be a difficult balance to hit. Well written nonfiction tops the list of some of my favorite books of the past few years, though ([b:The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History|17910054|The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1372677697s/17910054.jpg|25095506], [b:Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster|1898|Into Thin Air A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster|Jon Krakauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463384482s/1898.jpg|1816662], [b:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453215833s/1842.jpg|2138852], [b:The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon|3398625|The Lost City of Z A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon|David Grann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320487318s/3398625.jpg|3438638], pretty much all of DFW's essays, just to name a few off the old dome).
Hesitatingly I have to admit this history doesn't quite make it to that list for me. It creates an amazingly textured portrait of life in the 14th century, but gets way too bogged down in details to be the page turner that the others I mentioned were for me. That being said, it is definitely a worthwhile read. She has 2 main framing techniques to keep this from being more than an info dump: 1) the comparison of the chaos of the century (black plague, 2 popes, 100 years war, crusades, etc) to the similar history shaking events of the 20th, and 2) tracing the life of a typical leading noble through said chaos. I thought her first point was interesting, although I'm not sure if I agree with it, given how fast progress was happening in the 20th century and how static the 14th seems in comparison (maybe that includes an optimistic appraisal of what we learned from the world wars in the 20th century, but whatever, I'm an optimist). The second was an excellent way to cut through the figures and dates and add a little human interest.
I think it is worth a little digression to say that this book was written in the 1970s, and you can tell. History in its most basic form is something static- a straightforward retelling of historical events that everyone agreed happened. In reality, though, nothing is so black and white. The way we understand the already limited and distorted accountings of the past shifts based on the temporal and historical lens that we ourselves are looking out of. I would be interested to see what current historical scholars think of her summary of medieval attitudes. For example, she concludes based on lack of artistic and prose representations of motherhood, among other evidence, that children were hardly mothered or looked upon fondly until they reach the age of 7, when survival started to seem more likely. She then extrapolates this universally stunted childhood as a possible explanation for the emotionally stunted behaviors of many people in adulthood and the universal acceptance of bloody violence as a cultural norm. Could this really be true? Parental affection is such a basic biological imperative that I find it hard to believe that most mothers and fathers could ignore their children until what passed for adulthood in this age of high mortality.
Nonetheless, these sorts of cultural suppositions are the most interesting part by far of the book. I only care about the battles insofar as it reveals what the people of the time felt strongly about. The Hundred Year's War was basically a clusterf**k of incompetent nobles trying to prove their manhood by prancing around like massive metal turtles, strategy and training be damned. The cult of knighthood was foundering fast, and this makes for fascinating reading on the fallibility of human pride. I liked that the Swiss and the Turks made some guest appearances here and were like hey guys, while you were drinking wine and chasing women we were actually making military maneuvers, here are your bums because we just handed them to you. And Joan of Arc, that story told in the context of the times almost made me believe in miracles because how the hell did that happen.
And speaking of Joan of Arc, I think too that this century-ish really saw the growth of nationalism as a thing, a theme that is really interesting to explore, as its roots continue through today. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Italy and France and even England to an extent were really more of a group of warring tribes in the same region that only occasionally even identified as the same group, a phenomenon that honestly continues to today. If you go to Liguria vs even Milan, just one region over in Italy, the food, culture, and dialect to this day remain totally different. Italy, France, Switzerland- these are all just modern concepts that do not correspond to the reality of how people see or saw themselves. After reading this, my theory is that the concept of nation emerged to replace the crumbling of existing institutions that society organized itself around, from the papacy (hopelessly submerged in the politics of the schism) to the entire three estate system (useless nobles in their metal cocoons strike again).
I thought this was gonna be a short review (cool themes, too much detail), but I guess I laid out a bit of a thesis. I do understand a lot better the roots of the countries that I am now spending a whole lot of time in from reading this, and enjoyed it. Just took forever and a half to trudge through.
Hesitatingly I have to admit this history doesn't quite make it to that list for me. It creates an amazingly textured portrait of life in the 14th century, but gets way too bogged down in details to be the page turner that the others I mentioned were for me. That being said, it is definitely a worthwhile read. She has 2 main framing techniques to keep this from being more than an info dump: 1) the comparison of the chaos of the century (black plague, 2 popes, 100 years war, crusades, etc) to the similar history shaking events of the 20th, and 2) tracing the life of a typical leading noble through said chaos. I thought her first point was interesting, although I'm not sure if I agree with it, given how fast progress was happening in the 20th century and how static the 14th seems in comparison (maybe that includes an optimistic appraisal of what we learned from the world wars in the 20th century, but whatever, I'm an optimist). The second was an excellent way to cut through the figures and dates and add a little human interest.
I think it is worth a little digression to say that this book was written in the 1970s, and you can tell. History in its most basic form is something static- a straightforward retelling of historical events that everyone agreed happened. In reality, though, nothing is so black and white. The way we understand the already limited and distorted accountings of the past shifts based on the temporal and historical lens that we ourselves are looking out of. I would be interested to see what current historical scholars think of her summary of medieval attitudes. For example, she concludes based on lack of artistic and prose representations of motherhood, among other evidence, that children were hardly mothered or looked upon fondly until they reach the age of 7, when survival started to seem more likely. She then extrapolates this universally stunted childhood as a possible explanation for the emotionally stunted behaviors of many people in adulthood and the universal acceptance of bloody violence as a cultural norm. Could this really be true? Parental affection is such a basic biological imperative that I find it hard to believe that most mothers and fathers could ignore their children until what passed for adulthood in this age of high mortality.
Nonetheless, these sorts of cultural suppositions are the most interesting part by far of the book. I only care about the battles insofar as it reveals what the people of the time felt strongly about. The Hundred Year's War was basically a clusterf**k of incompetent nobles trying to prove their manhood by prancing around like massive metal turtles, strategy and training be damned. The cult of knighthood was foundering fast, and this makes for fascinating reading on the fallibility of human pride. I liked that the Swiss and the Turks made some guest appearances here and were like hey guys, while you were drinking wine and chasing women we were actually making military maneuvers, here are your bums because we just handed them to you. And Joan of Arc, that story told in the context of the times almost made me believe in miracles because how the hell did that happen.
And speaking of Joan of Arc, I think too that this century-ish really saw the growth of nationalism as a thing, a theme that is really interesting to explore, as its roots continue through today. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Italy and France and even England to an extent were really more of a group of warring tribes in the same region that only occasionally even identified as the same group, a phenomenon that honestly continues to today. If you go to Liguria vs even Milan, just one region over in Italy, the food, culture, and dialect to this day remain totally different. Italy, France, Switzerland- these are all just modern concepts that do not correspond to the reality of how people see or saw themselves. After reading this, my theory is that the concept of nation emerged to replace the crumbling of existing institutions that society organized itself around, from the papacy (hopelessly submerged in the politics of the schism) to the entire three estate system (useless nobles in their metal cocoons strike again).
I thought this was gonna be a short review (cool themes, too much detail), but I guess I laid out a bit of a thesis. I do understand a lot better the roots of the countries that I am now spending a whole lot of time in from reading this, and enjoyed it. Just took forever and a half to trudge through.