A Distant Mirror Quotes

“Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God,”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events. No”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the world died.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century