Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror (1978)

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Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.

Barbara W. Tuchman
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, no epoch was more naturally mad.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

Barbara W. Tuchman
His (Deschamps') complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Barbara W. Tuchman
On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he (Sigismund) turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Barbara W. Tuchman
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.

Barbara W. Tuchman
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

Barbara W. Tuchman
If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Barbara W. Tuchman
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Barbara W. Tuchman
What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Barbara W. Tuchman
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.

Barbara W. Tuchman
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

Barbara W. Tuchman
The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.

Barbara W. Tuchman
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Barbara W. Tuchman
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

Barbara W. Tuchman
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.

Barbara W. Tuchman
To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law [in the 14th century] prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and underage children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.

Barbara W. Tuchman
More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life...

Barbara W. Tuchman
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

Barbara W. Tuchman