Reddit reviews A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
We found 32 Reddit comments about A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
14th CenturyEuropeHistoryMedievalModern World
>In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws.
>Barbara Tuchman, "A Distant Mirror: life in the calamitous 14th century"
If you wanted to take your interest further
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571
Sometimes, an in-depth case study of a specific person/event can reveal larger truths about the period being studied.
Probably my favorite history book ever, A Distant Mirror, is framed as a biography of a relatively unimportant French noble from the period for precisely this reason.
In other cases, historians are forced to take this approach because the surviving writing from a period is mostly about the smaller subject. The reason so many studies of Norman England are about land ownership isn't because it's necessarily the best way to understand the time period, it's because we happen to know way more about land ownership from the time period than we do about anything else. I'm not sure this is true of, say, Dutch local political parties from the interwar period, but it wouldn't surprise me if whoever wrote that paper had an exceptionally good group of documents on them. The fact that a paper might attract a small or specialized readership shouldn't diminish its scholarly importance.
EDIT: bad grammar corrected
There are no knights in shining armor in the books any more than on the show. Knights in ASoIaF are of the Gregor Clegane variety: they use their title and power to rape and pillage.
There's a fantastic book on the Middle Ages called A Distant Mirror, and it explains how even in Medieval times, the idea of the "knight in shining armor" was an outdated myth that didn't reflect reality. One of the reasons I took to A Game of Thrones when I read it is that it was the first "accurate" portrayal of historical knights that I could think of.
A Song of Ice and Fire is by no means faeries and fair maidens... The show extrapolates the tone of the books.
The French knights of this era are nothing like what you're describing here, J. Alfred. Please take a look at this book for a fascinating look at this period. Most French knights in the 14th and 15th century were closer to Sir Jack Falstaff than Sir Lancelot.
Enguerrand I, Lord of Coucy
I have been reading "A Distant Mirror" an amazing book about medieval history, and decided to play as , the first royal ancestor of the main character in the book.
To play him the start date has to be January 1, 1077, and choose the County of Amiens in the Kingdom of France.
Me and my friend have had a back and forth succession game as his line and it has been a blast. You are constantly caught in the middle of France exploding into revolutions, the English, Flemish, and HRE, among others, all trying to encroach on your position. It is a constant defensive battle, but very rewarding when you manage to snag an extra county or two.
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
I'm a big fan of Barbara Tuchman. Her book A Distant Mirror is about the Fourteenth Century. It is specifically focused on Europe (mostly France and England). It has an excellent chapter on the black death.
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571
Yes, this. The Protestant Work Ethic: idle hands, etc.
Of course the puritans weren't the inventors of such notions. In the Middle Ages, usury (making money out of money, or charging "excessive" interest for loans) was a sin, technology which allowed one person to do more work than another were forbidden. The word curfew ("cover fires") comes from the extinguishing of all lights so that no-one could work after dark to increase productivity. (For most of this I use Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as reference)
Human beings do seem to have an innate distaste for unfairness. We're social creatures, after all. Perhaps the drive that motivates the above, as well as the denigration of work that seems "too easy" is simple jealousy, maybe combined with the fear of being used.
ETA Link to A Distant Mirror on Amazon. It's a great book; y'all history buffs should read it, or some of her other works. A history prof I know regards Tuchman very highly.
It's just you. Hobb's Elderlings series was first published in 1995. GRRM's ASOIAF was started in 1991, and there are many accounts/interviews that document GRRM's inspirations and overall vision he planned from the beginning.
GRRM's website FAQ also lists a number of book titles he used for research. I've read some of them, and the specific influences are not hard to pick up on. For example, A Distant Mirror describes a family that grew to importance because they built up their main keep at a major river crossing and controlled all traffic through it, just like House Frey.
Additionally, themes of mental connections with fantasy animals, people riding dragons they are connected to, etc. are all old tropes. An easy example is McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series that was first published in 1967.
EDIT: Also you may want to fix the references to "worgs" in your article; you have them down as "wogs."
Well, this book covers much of the 14th century, but it’s not as recent as the Thirty Years War. Nevertheless, it’s regularly mentioned in this sub as one of the best historical books altogether.
For anyone interested in this area in the previous century, this book is just great.
A fantastic book, A Distant Mirror is a detailed glimpse of medieval 1300's French and English life, from royalty to peasantry.
There are some sections in the book that describe mercenary groups, including some interesting bits about groups that don't get paid, and essentially leaderless bands that pillaged 'friendly' countrysides just to survive. Some were as big as standing armies, but without a war to fight, bank to fund them, or often even a purpose just hardend soldiers - and how they roamed pilliaging summer seasons and forcefully occupied random towns for winters .
I'm assuming by medieval/renaissance you mean the traditional European inspired fantasy. Here's a brain dump:
Feudalism:
I feel like I see a lot of fantasy where heroes turn up at some village and get asked to fight someone or other because the villagers have nowhere else to turn to. What I don't often see is the local knight living in the manor across the field whose responsibility it is to be a warrior and protect his fief and who probably doesn't appreciate strangers turning up and undermining his authority by doing his job for him.
There would probably also be a lot of small wars going on at any given time between knights and barons and earls that provide lots of work for dangerous people but have nothing to do with the greater battle battle between good and evil.
Knighthood:
Speaking of knights a knight isn't "someone who fights with plate armour and a sword," that's what they were IRL because that was the most effective way to fight and you needed a certain amount of wealth and status to afford the huge investment in training and equipment. If you have a fantasy world where with enough training and expensive equipment people can learn to shoot fire and call down lightning that will break a cavalry charge then that world's knights will almost certainly all be wizards. And very few other people will be allowed to be.
Era-appropriate firearms:
That aesthetic of people in plate armour with cannons is something you almost never see depicted.
Renaissance fashion:
Speaks for itself.
Medieval medicine and science:
A physician diagnosing you by cross referencing your symptoms with the alignment of the stars to decide how to properly balance your humors isn't something I've seen a lot of in fantasy. That element of earnestly applying the scientific method to things you don't understand based on what seem to us like completely ridiculous variables and assumptions. Also more folk medicine like plants that only had medicinal properties if you found them by accident or sympathetic magic like curing a rabid dog bite using the literal hair of the dog that bit you.
On a similar note you don't see a lot of importance put on folk superstition like hanging horseshoes above doors to keep out evil spirits/the devil/elves trying to steal your children. I feel like basing a fantasy world's idea of magic around the small everyday things might make a change from the usual Big Magic stuff.
The equator:
Not really something that will affect the day-to-day feel of a world but I read once that some people believed that the equator was hotter because it was closer to the sun and that right on the equator it would be too hot for anything to survive or cross. So they thought the entire southern hemisphere was inaccessible due to this deadly heat barrier. Not sure what you could do with it but I thought it was a neat idea. Maybe the discovery or creation of a tunnel under the equator would be an interesting way to introducing a "new world" to explore that developed totally independently.
The devil:
You know where medieval people got magic powers? By serving the devil. You know how they became werewolves? Made a deal with the devil. You know how women learned arithmetic? You better believe that's the devil. A lot of fantasy treats the monsters and magic and whatnot as just the natural flora and fauna of the world but these days I don't feel like I've seen much that filters the world through that lens of everything comes from one or two sources that have strong moral stances associated with them and, therefore, everything that comes from them does too.
Pilgrimages:
I don't know, you just never see them in fantasy but in the middle ages they were quite the thing from the noble woman who spends ten years of her life travelling constantly between holy sites to the common folk for whom the trip to visit the bones of St Whoever is basically the closest they ever have to a holiday.
Ships:
Don't have your medieval knights cross the sea on what amounts to a 17th century galleon like I feel like I keep seeing. Not when there are cool medieval and renaissance ships you could use:
Level of material wealth/standard of living:
When you turn up in a sleepy little farming village there probably won't be a big inn with a roaring fire, a dinner menu and a dozen rentable rooms. There will be a family that'll let you sleep on the floor of their one-room cottage for a few coins and might even share some of their latest batch of beer with you. Even the lord of the castle may very well sleep in the same room as their whole family and several servants. When you try to sell your stack of looted swords to the local blacksmith they aren't going to have cash sitting around to pay you. But they could offer you a box of nails and some of the loaves of bread the baker owes them.
Little things:
I feel like a lot of the reason "medieval" fantasy tends to feel stale is that it's mostly made up of just all the bits and pieces of history that people are familiar with smooshed together. Good for acccessibility, bad for originality. Often just adding little details or taking away familiar things can make a difference. Look up the things they had in place of anything resembling modern law enforcement like Tithings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing) and the Hue and Cry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry) or people bringing their own mugs to taverns because the taverns couldn't just buy bulk mugs off the shelf or the fact that it could take members of ten different guilds to make a suit of armour and anyone trying to do the bits that are covered by another guild will find themselves out of work pretty quick. Maybe read something like https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571. Look up medieval bestiaries to learn how lions are born dead and brought to life by their mothers or how vultures can see the future.
Possibly this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404330328&sr=1-2
Without having read it, it doesn't look like what I would call "summer reading" but YMMV
I see. I lost track of the thread. I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Amazing read. Quick thumbnail: the Black Death wasn't the only, and may not have even been the worst thing that happened during what sounds like an unusually crappy time to have been alive (in Europe at least). War, famine, rape, pillage, robbery, bandits, a stark contrast between the ideals of courtesy and the actual behavior of mounted knights. Seemingly small value placed on life at all levels of society, but of course especially for the regular people.
It seems to me that the two strengths of the series are world-building and character depth. If this is your favorite series, you probably like it for one or both of those things.
If you like it for the world building, I recommend history books such as the History of the Peloponnesian War or A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
If you like complex characters, then the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Another strength of asoiaf is that it isn't too heavy handed regarding magic in the story, and this is a strength of the Mistborn series too.
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
I'll give you two that I've enjoyed lately:
Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations talks about some states that you see in Eu4 like Aragon, Burgundy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century takes you into the life of a French nobleman during the Hundred Years War. I'd check out pretty much anything else by Tuchman while you're at it.
History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer. I'm reading this now and I've really enjoyed it, very clear writing and introductory overviews to cultures all over the world - Europe, North Africa, China, Korea, India, you name it.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. This one was highly recommended on /r/medievalhistory
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
absolutely enthralling. i've never read something so informative and entertaining...she teleports you to a different world: ours, 700 years ago.
next on the list is Immanuel Wallerstein's 4 volume World Systems Series. it's been on my bucket list since i took a course in undergrad on the subject.
then, marx's capital.
This is a classic that I remember enjoying greatly. https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571
I'd suggest the 14th Century. Black plague, 100-years war, massive social unrest. See A Distant Mirror and more info here.
I that case you might be interested in the following books:
Barbra Tuchman's The Guns of August is a personal favorite of mine. Her A Distant Mirror is also supposed to be very good, though I haven't managed to get to it yet.
Carl Sagan is also a great choice if you are interested in space.
A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman
Words don't do it justice. One of the reviews was "real life Game of Thrones" and while it's somewhat trite, it's also true. The subject is an example of the best of the medieval era, and his life touched on many events that shaped western history.
One warning, it's probably going to be a tough nut for a 15 year old to crack. It's accessible as a narrative, but you should expect to have to wiki things, look at maps, and use supporting material to explain the basics.
For a less intense look, one of the "Life in" books by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies (Life in a Medieval City, LIA Medieval Castle, LIA Medieval Village), is a look at the everyday in that time. Medieval Village is the best one to start with. Rather than the names and dates of "big history", they are the traditions, customs, and anecdotes of everyday life, based on specific examples in specific time periods.
I don't see a 15 year old having trouble going through them. They are written plainly and attempt to explain the backdrop of history that those places are in. Additional material will be minimal beyond wikipedia.
I'm not homeschooling, but I'm certainly going to expose my children to these books when they're old enough.
First witnessed in 1374 - good article here. I remember reading about this years ago, the main suggestion being that it was in the years following the black death which led to an upsurge in religious fervour - also lots of examples of self-flagellation - basically people doing anything they thought would mean God spared them from the plague.
Read it in A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman which is a fantastic read if you're interested in this sort of thing.
If this topic has resonance then you'd do well to read a book like A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. She covers the black death and several other issues of great import from that time.
I also recommend "A Distant Mirror", by Barbara Tuchman
The best book I've ever read about medieval Europe is Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. It's a bit dense but you don't have to be a history scholar to enjoy it by any means. It really seemed to cover the whole breadth of medieval society and the political powers and figures at work. It was engaging enough that I wanted to start over at the beginning once I reached the end! Can't say that about any other nonfiction book I've read.
If you'd like to read a well-researched, balanced, and truly terrifying combo of journalism and epidemiology, you could do worse than The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
True, but also bored. Knights and other nobles without much fighting to do literally became brigands and also started attacking each other. I just read "A Distant Mirror" by Tuchman and she talks all about it.
> Pillars of the Earth
that looks good. have you read a distant mirror?