Book Thoughts: A DISTANT MIRROR

A DISTANT MIRROR, by Barbara Tuchmann is a compelling look at the 14th Century. It takes you beyond the major players into the "people on the ground". Granted, the major players are a big part of the narrative, but for once you get a feel for the impact on the "ordinary folks". Reading a high school textbook, you miss so much of what really happened. I, for one, did not realize that the Black Death was not a one time occurrence. Yes, it wiped out a tremendous amount of people in one year, but it came back in smaller waves over and over again.

The rulers of that era played the game of Monopoly, using their children(usually the girls) as pieces of power brokering. Giving a 6 month old girl in marriage to a 28 year old king or prince has it's share of issues. War seemed to be more of a way to gain financially or to serve as a means to attain glory than anything else. The rulers would pillage their own people to gain financially, whether by taxes or actual pillaging.

What I found most aggravating was the role the Church played. They didn't seem to REALLY care about people, just about money and power. I found also that several of the tenets of both Protestant and Catholic Church today were devised during this time period. That is not a compliment and truth be told, the politics within both the Protestant and Catholic Churches today rival those of the 14th Century.

I came away from the book both enlightened and angry. Enlightened in the sense that I felt I understood a great deal more of history. Angry because I felt lied to by the textbooks and by the church. It certainly gave me a whole new way of seeing the present and future in relation to the past. I feel better for it, even though betrayed by those who randomly, it seems, have taken the title historian. If we whitewash the past, are we helping ourselves? How is it that we seldom hear about the advances they made, instead we are led to believe that the past is bad and the future/present is good? Being in Europe, their sense of history, reflected in the refusal to destroy past in order to "bring things up to date" is refreshing. The past gives us a sense of permanence in a changing and volatile world. We need that.