A review by bvolck
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman

3.0

Three stars for the work necessary to write an engagingly-written narrative. As a history, however, it gives little coherence to fourteenth century Europe as a whole. Its greatest problem, though, lies in the way it essentializes the past as incomprehensibly other, rather like Said's category of Orientalism does to the East. There is little to no attempt to understand the motivations of the main characters as people like you and me. The result is to reify the late middle ages as an entity that can be studied and depicted in the service of an imperial modernity. A kind of history, to be sure, but not one I find helpful.