135 - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

A Distant Mirror:
The Calamitous 14th Century
By Barbara W. Tuchman
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. 677 pp. $15.95.

Barbara Tuchman needs no introduction. Her name tinkles in the cocktail glasses, and her book lies on the coffee tables from coast to coast. Awarded the Pulitzer prize for two of her volumes, The Guns of August and Stillwell and the American Experience in China, she is a brilliant writer and one of the most widely read historians of our day. In her latest work she leaves the twentieth century only to find in the fourteenth century a distant mirror of the twentieth, with its surface glitter of kings, castles, and crusades, but its black undercoating of disease, wars, atrocities, deaths, decline, and spiritual agony.

This huge history is a remarkable achievement not only for its literary skill and panoramic sweep, but for the range of subjects introduced-from social and cultural history woven into the tapestry which depicts largely the world of French chivalry and reflects the concerns of the chroniclers, such as the ever-recurring Froissart. Both as a literary device and as a concrete historical case study, the author builds her narrative around the life story of Enguerrand de Coucy VII, "the most skilled and experienced of all the knights of France," a member of the most powerful family in Picardy. His lineage, nobility, position in the realm, twice offered the position of constable, his private wars, religious convictions, military expeditions for France, and finally the fatal crusade against Bajazet I all make his life a paradigm for the fortune and fate of the second estate-if one individual can ever truly represent a class. His death symbolized the end of a dying world. The

136 - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

mood she seeks to create is reminiscent of Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages.

Tuchman has a perfect eye for the apt quotation, colorful scandals, lively events, disastrous developments, sensational and even sadistic acts, all calculated to catch and hold the reader's attention. So readable is this justly popular work that it seems gratuitous to fault it for its errata or to spell out its serious limitations. Members of the historians' guild have niggled at mistaken detail and have dismissed the work with scorn. It is a popular work and its critical apparatus does not approach academic standards. Its bibliography omits basic books in English and French and is totally devoid of German titles, with a benign neglect of the work of Italian and Spanish medievalists as well.

It is also necessary to point to some major limitations of the work as a picture of the fourteenth century, which are largely a result of the device of concentrating on a representative of French chivalry to carry the freight of a century. The Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Eastern Europe, and, except for French excursions into Italy, the home of the Renaissance, are largely omitted from serious consideration. Much church history and the positive side of religious life, the vitality of scholastic theology, increase in religious fervor, early humanism, and other intellectual currents are not given their just due. One cannot, for example, treat Jean Gerson mainly in connection with his treatise critical of Jean de Meung's Romance or as a moral critic and then not present his serious theological work.

Tying in so exclusively with the chivalric element in decline precludes an appreciation of the bourgeois surge and urban life. Further, there are several recent works on the peasants in this century which have drawn human features into those anonymous ovals. The colorful description often comes through as a surface phenomenon, like the view of a water-spider skimming over a deep, dark pool without adequate analysis of why. There are signs of presentism in evidence, the historian's "leaky boat," with sensational accounts reflecting the insanities of our own times too closely.

In a recent paper on "the new old history," Lawrence Stone ventured a tentative apology for narratio rediviva, citing the limitations of the ideologists, Marxists or social science theorists, and quantifiers, pointing to successful narrative history as the long-admired synthesis. Yes, historians must not merely make bricks with or without straw, but must use the building blocks of monographs to construct analyses, intermediate accounts, or full narrative histories which will be true humanistic monuments.

The author of this volume is indeed aware of demographic, climatic, and topographical factors, though she makes no great display of them in tables and charts. But her necessary modesty in entering a field so far removed as the Middle Ages prevents her from using these results of detailed professional scholarship to full advantage in dealing with the causal nexus, nor does she always choose well among authorities.

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Nevertheless, this book is a splendid work of art, and in terms of skillful writing and tremendous public impact might well be the object of the envy of her academic detractors.

Lewis W. Spitz
Stanford University
Stanford, California