Written by Barbara Tuchman:
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571This books gives you an excellent insight into a powerful sense of impending doom that prevailed by the end 14th Century - the begiining of the end of Medieval period.
In A Distant Mirror, historian Barbara Tuchman reveals in harrowing detail a "tortured century" with parallels to our own. People in the fourteenth century were subjected to natural and man-made disasters, including the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, insurrection, lawlessness, the Schism of the Church, massacres of Jewish people, and the Black Death, which claimed the lives of nearly half the population living between India and Iceland. Barbara Tuchman introduces a nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy (1340-1397), a "whole man in a fractured time," who takes the reader through the century and gives a personalized context through which to understand the events and attitudes of the day. A Distant Mirror goes beyond recording facts to analyze the psychology of the age as it follows Enguerrand from one battle to the next, observing how bankruptcies, crop failures, revolts, and plagues effectively forced people apart so that "emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy..." Suggesting that the "relative emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the casual attitude toward life and suffering," she illustrates the discrepancy between the ideal and the real apparent in upper-class traditions of chivalry, in the practice of Christianity, and in the impossible regulations imposed on nobles, priests, and commoners alike. Pessimism inevitably resulted, for "man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society." This fascinating portrayal of a tumultuous time provides insights into the present and hope for the future.
