"Beautifully written, careful, and thorough in its scholarship.What Ms. Tuchman does superbly
is to tell how it was.No one has ever done this better."New York Review of Books

"Barbara Tuchman at the top of her powers.A beautiful, extraordinary book.She has done nothing
finer."Wall Street Journal

"Wise, witty, and wonderful.A great book, in a great historical tradition."Commentary

The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and
castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and the exquisitely decorated Books of Hours; and on the other, a
time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague.

Barbara Tuchman reveals both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was
lived. Here are the guilty passions, loyalties and treacheries, political assassinations, sea battles and sieges,
corruption in high places and a yearning for reform, satire and humor, sorcery and demonology, and lust and
sadism on the stage. Here are proud cardinals, beggars, feminists, university scholars, grocers, bankers,
mercenaries, mystics, lawyers and tax collectors, and, dominating all, the knight in his valor and "furious follies,"
a "terrible worm in an iron cocoon."

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989), American historian, was born in New York City and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933. She won the Pulitzer Prize for history twice, for The Guns of August (1962), and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971).

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.