A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Barbara Tuchman uses the biography of one 14th-century French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, to tell the story of the most catastrophic century in medieval European history: the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Great Schism, and the peasant uprisings that followed. Over 44,000 Goodreads ratings make this the most widely read narrative history of the medieval period in English. Tuchman won two Pulitzer Prizes and this is her most ambitious work.