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For the book club we are reading my favorite type of book right about this time of year: 700-page chonkers about medieval Europe. The lucky tome this month is A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning popular historian Barbara Tuchman. This book was published in 1972, but still seems to be considered pretty credible, as far as popular history goes.
Though the framing is that it’s about the 14th century world, this is really a book about 14th century Europe, focused predominantly on France. France is of course actually smack in the middle of Europe, although Europe only thinks it is smack-dab the center of the world. But this is only annoying in the intro and outro chapters. The rest of the book is just a wild ride through Europe and has a much, much more interesting framing device: our unifying thread through the story is the life one Enguerrand VII de Coucy, lord of a castle in Picardy with a ridiculously large central keep. Enguerrand survives for most of the century by a combination of being very lucky and being actually kind of smart, or perhaps more specifically wise, which isn’t really among the noble classes at this time.
The 14th century was a bad time in Europe. It was certainly exciting, but mostly in awful ways. The second half of the century was punctuated by outbreaks of the Black Death, which first hit in 1347 and of which there were about half a dozen waves by 1399. This was also the century of the infamous schism in the Catholic Church, where there was a Pope in Avignon and a Pope in Rome and then at one point a third Pope somewhere else. Most of the hundred years of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England fell into this century. There were a bunch of Crusades that all went comically poorly (they certainly weren’t comical at the time, but from the vantage point of 700 years and personal apostasy from the Catholic Church, I cannot help but think it’s funny when the Christians lose crusades). Whenever the wars stopped, big groups of discharged warriors formed little bandit companies and roamed around continuing to do warfare-type activities upon the populace. Medieval warfare appears to have consisted about 2% of embodying the chivalrous ideal of knights heroically stabbing other knights in pitched battle on an open plain, and 98% things that have since been (theoretically) banned as war crimes and terrorism under the Geneva Convention. (This math leaves 0 percentage points available for newfangled tactical tomfoolery like “reconnaissance.”) If you, like me, enjoy reading about awful things, 14th century France provides an embarrassment of riches. It also provides an embarrassment of riches if you, like me, think people ought to be embarrassed about the riches they acquire by violence and dispossession.
The writing style of this book is not dense, as in it is neither dry nor academic, but instead infused with a sort of dryly chatty sense of humor that might not be wholly objective but which I enjoyed a lot. This is important because the content is very dense, in that there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of people to keep track of. The morass of repetitive names and titles can make it very easy to forget who we are talking about at any given time, and at some point I had to decide to just roll with it instead of constantly going back and trying to re-establish who was who. This is of course not Barbara Tuchman’s fault–she did, after all, go to great lengths to give us a distinctive “main character” whose name was neither Philippe, nor Louis, nor Charles–it’s mainly the fault of the French and the English. Tuchman is able to turn some of the repetitiveness of the 14th century into jokes as well, such as an extremely funny running gag about how much the moralizers of the time hated pointed shoes, which persisted in being popular despite being objectively one of the dumbest fashion trends of all time. I am sure book club will have a nice deep conversation about the politics of the time and what it says about the politics of now but I’m just gonna be like “lol, pointed shoes” the whole time.
Anyway, I loved this book. Get thee to a library anon and check it out.
Though the framing is that it’s about the 14th century world, this is really a book about 14th century Europe, focused predominantly on France. France is of course actually smack in the middle of Europe, although Europe only thinks it is smack-dab the center of the world. But this is only annoying in the intro and outro chapters. The rest of the book is just a wild ride through Europe and has a much, much more interesting framing device: our unifying thread through the story is the life one Enguerrand VII de Coucy, lord of a castle in Picardy with a ridiculously large central keep. Enguerrand survives for most of the century by a combination of being very lucky and being actually kind of smart, or perhaps more specifically wise, which isn’t really among the noble classes at this time.
The 14th century was a bad time in Europe. It was certainly exciting, but mostly in awful ways. The second half of the century was punctuated by outbreaks of the Black Death, which first hit in 1347 and of which there were about half a dozen waves by 1399. This was also the century of the infamous schism in the Catholic Church, where there was a Pope in Avignon and a Pope in Rome and then at one point a third Pope somewhere else. Most of the hundred years of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England fell into this century. There were a bunch of Crusades that all went comically poorly (they certainly weren’t comical at the time, but from the vantage point of 700 years and personal apostasy from the Catholic Church, I cannot help but think it’s funny when the Christians lose crusades). Whenever the wars stopped, big groups of discharged warriors formed little bandit companies and roamed around continuing to do warfare-type activities upon the populace. Medieval warfare appears to have consisted about 2% of embodying the chivalrous ideal of knights heroically stabbing other knights in pitched battle on an open plain, and 98% things that have since been (theoretically) banned as war crimes and terrorism under the Geneva Convention. (This math leaves 0 percentage points available for newfangled tactical tomfoolery like “reconnaissance.”) If you, like me, enjoy reading about awful things, 14th century France provides an embarrassment of riches. It also provides an embarrassment of riches if you, like me, think people ought to be embarrassed about the riches they acquire by violence and dispossession.
The writing style of this book is not dense, as in it is neither dry nor academic, but instead infused with a sort of dryly chatty sense of humor that might not be wholly objective but which I enjoyed a lot. This is important because the content is very dense, in that there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of people to keep track of. The morass of repetitive names and titles can make it very easy to forget who we are talking about at any given time, and at some point I had to decide to just roll with it instead of constantly going back and trying to re-establish who was who. This is of course not Barbara Tuchman’s fault–she did, after all, go to great lengths to give us a distinctive “main character” whose name was neither Philippe, nor Louis, nor Charles–it’s mainly the fault of the French and the English. Tuchman is able to turn some of the repetitiveness of the 14th century into jokes as well, such as an extremely funny running gag about how much the moralizers of the time hated pointed shoes, which persisted in being popular despite being objectively one of the dumbest fashion trends of all time. I am sure book club will have a nice deep conversation about the politics of the time and what it says about the politics of now but I’m just gonna be like “lol, pointed shoes” the whole time.
Anyway, I loved this book. Get thee to a library anon and check it out.