The mind of the 14th Century was encased in the paradoxical mental outlook of a romantic chivalry foreign to modern sensibilities, and the clash of this ideal, and of the universally accepted values of Christianity, with harsh reality in the form of bubonic plague, the Hundred Years' War, and the exile and schism of the Papacy, led to turmoil. It sometimes times seems that brutal carnage in the name of an ideal, universal social unrest, and a pervasive sense of decline are the hallmarks of our era, they were equally characteristic of the period Tuchman recreates in such absorbing detail. With consummate ease, Barbara Tuchman draws her reader into the sprawling, violent 14th Century, making clear at once both the gulf that separates the modern and medieval worlds, and those striking, often ugly, similarities, lodged in the human character, which make that age a mirror of our own humanity.
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