Medieval Greatest Hits
Explore the Medieval Greatest Hits collection—a curated list of essential books on the Middle Ages. From Boccaccio’s timeless fiction, *The Decameron*, to Barbara W. Tuchman’s gripping history, *A Distant Mirror*, and the classic *Canterbury Tales*, discover the best medieval reads for history buffs and literature lovers alike.
Book
The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Set against the backdrop of the fourteenth-century Black Death, an anthology of one hundred interlinked tales presents a variety of works recounted by the citizens of Florence--nobles, knights, abbots, nuns, doctors, philosophers, students, peasants, pilgrims, thieves, and others--who have fled the city to escape the plague.
Book
A Distant Mirror
by Barbara W. Tuchman
A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “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.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary