500 Great Books By Women discussion

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara W. Tuchman, 1978, Europe (United States), NONFICTION

"...It follows Enguerrand from one battle to the next, observing how bankruptcies, crop failures, revolts, and plagues effectively forced people apart, so that "emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy." Suggesting that the "relative emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the casual attitude toward life and suffering," she illustrates the discrepancy between the ideal and the real apparent in upper-class traditions of chivalry, in the practices of Christianity, and in the impossible regulations imposed on nobles, priests, and commoners alike..."

(L.A., p. 214)