Book Review: Barbara Tuchman

"A Distant Mirror", by Barbara Tuchman, continues to be a very popular book on medieval history. But how accurate is it?

Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" (1978), a study of the 14th century in Western Europe (mainly northern France) with a strong focus on the societal aftereffects of the Black Death, is one of the most popular books on medieval history ever. It's also one of the most excoriated works by medieval historians ever. I'm not sure that it deserves that kind of singular bad press from academia (surely, Gibbon and Scott are both still worthy of a few good slaps), but it has become a bit dated and does make some sweeping generalizations about medieval life that don't fly now.

A Distant Mirror actually works fine for those needing a stirring introduction to medieval social history. It moves fast, it has endnotes (if not footnotes, because we all know those are too stodgy to hold a lay reader's interest) and it has a broad scope for its subject. Tuchman definitely has wit and her passages on the impact of the Black Death are gripping. The Black Death was truly the worst natural disaster that European history has ever seen and hopefully will ever see. You can even see it reflected in works like the ostensibly early Slavic legend behind "Night on Bald Mountain" (in this week's film review).

Where she stumbles is in her global use of some theories (many of which are now obsolete) and her tendency to make assumptions about how her historical characters felt, even though she tries to eschew that in her introduction. This is where her over-reliance on other people's original research and English translations, due to her basic lack of foreign-language skills, trips her up. For example, she makes comments about medieval European psychology based on an analysis of images of the Virgin Mary where post-Black Death images increasingly have the Virgin worshipping a Baby Jesus lying on the cold hard ground instead of holding her in his arms.

The problem here lies in the cognitive leap that she makes from what the Virgin is doing in late medieval art to what late medieval women were allegedly doing following the Black Death (not showing affection to their children to avoid the pain of bonding with, then losing, so many of them), and how this even more allegedly produced a generation of mother-love-deprived psychopaths among the nobility. As you can see, this is a problematic chain of logic. In less academic terms, it's a stretch going from a picture of the Virgin to the viciousness of post-Black Death knights in battle. Other popular histories, particularly of the world-history variety (Jared M. Diamond's paen to geographical history in Guns, Germs and Steel being a notable example) make similar stretches that have discredited the "long view" or "big picture" approach to history in academic circles. Such broad theories too often highlight the cultural prejudices and limitations of the writer more than anything else.