A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman: A review

I saw a reference to this book recently in something else I was reading and thought, "Oh, yes, I remember reading that book." But then I took the book down from the shelf to look at it and realized that I hadn't read it at all. I think I may have started and stopped. After all, it was published in 1978 which was an extraordinarily busy time in my life, so I may simply not have had the energy for it. It is a dense and long book.

I'm so glad that I picked it up again. The world has turned many times since its publication date more than thirty years ago, but when you get right down to it, not much has changed about human nature. Indeed, not much has changed since the 14th century about which Tuchman was writing. 

Europe - specifically France and England - in the 14th century was beset by an incredible series of catastrophes. There was climate change (the Little Ice Age), the Hundred Years War between England and France, the papal schism, the last Crusades, pillaging companies of brigands, peasant revolts, and then, to top it all off, the cherry on top of the whipped cream so to speak, there was the Black Death. 

The deadly pestilence of the bubonic plague may have killed a third of the total population. No one can say with absolute certainty. What is known is that many areas were virtually depopulated. The plague hit not just once but at intervals throughout the last part of this rotten century and into the 15th century. 

Meanwhile, the wars ground on incessantly with, as usual, the poor ordinary folk as their main victims. When one considers all the things that went wrong in this century, it is somewhat amazing that anything of European society remained when it finally dragged to its sorry end. 

Barbara Tuchman was a tireless and thorough researcher and it certainly shows in this book. With an enormous amount of ground to cover and events to explain, she frequently wanders off in delightful ways to various related topics of medieval life. With all that meandering though, she still manages to keep the reader focused on a clear narrative of events. 

She does this by the device of showing us the benighted century though the life of a particular man, a French nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy. Coucy was a sort of 14th century Forrest Gump who happened to be present at many of the important events that occurred during his lifetime. Moreover, his activities were remarkably well-documented and he was an inspired choice for the peg on which to hang the tattered cloak of this century. 

The title of this book, A Distant Mirror, was an acknowledgement by Ms. Tuchman that her century, the 20th, was in many ways a reflection of the medieval century. If you think about that long list of tragedies that were to mark that long-ago time and compare them to the events of the 20th and now 21st centuries, the things which they have in common are apparent. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it and we never seem to learn. 

If we fail to learn, it cannot be laid on the shoulders of Barbara Tuchman who did a truly masterful job of bringing the calamitous century to life and making us feel the pain of those who lived and died (often horribly) there.

Neo-Nazism is not just a European phenomenon

I was listening to a discussion on NPR this morning about the rise of neo-Nazism in Europe.  The discussion, of course, was current because of the killings in Norway by an extremist Christian, Muslim-hating Norwegian who wanted to bring about a revolution that would "purify" the population and stop the inflow of immigrants from the Near East.  The rise of neo-Nazism in many European countries has been a concern for awhile and has led to the election of some fairly right-wing governments in many countries, including the United Kingdom.  What the participants in this discussion failed to mention (at least during the time that I was listening) is that this is not just a European phenomenon.  Neo-Nazism is very much a modern American phenomenon as well.

You need only look at the state legislatures and governors around the country that were elected last year to see the extent of this philosophy's hold on American imaginations.  In states throughout the country that are ruled by Republican majorities in their governments, we see a concerted effort to reduce the freedoms of citizens and increase the government's control over individual lives.  State after state continues to try to restrict collective bargaining rights, to restrict women's rights to abortion (or even to contraception), to refuse basic human rights to homosexuals, to tear holes in the social safety net by reducing the availability of unemployment compensation and Medicaid, to impose discriminatory laws against Muslims and immigrants whose skin color the majority doesn't like, and to make it as hard as possible for people to vote.  This is not a complete list, but these are some of the more popular actions taken by our home-grown neo-Nazis in this season of intolerance.

In taking these actions, they are egged on by right-wing talk radio where hate speech is the standard means of communication, and, of course, they receive encouragement and sympathetic coverage from their favorite television network, Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Center which tracks hate groups across the country has noted the rise in neo-Nazism and the explosion in the numbers of the groups which they track.  A look at their "hate map" which shows where such groups are located in every state is a real eye-opener.  Texas, for example, has 59 such documented groups.

The point is that it isn't just Europe that needs to be concerned about the rise of Nazism and the threat to personal liberties.  Our country, too, trembles on the brink of a fall into the abyss and it is not just an abyss of financial failure.  Intolerance is a cancer in our country and it is growing.

As William Faulkner once assured us, "The past is never dead; it isn't even past."  And as George Santayana said, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."  Personally, I don't want to repeat the 1930s and 1940s.

The Lady in the Tower by Alison Weir: A review

Having read several fictional accounts of the Tudor era, including Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and the Tudor mystery series by C.J. Sansom, I thought it might be interesting to get an actual historian's take on the period. Alison Weir is an actual British historian who has had an almost life-long fascination with that era and has written widely about it. This book, The Lady in the Tower, concerns the last four months of the life of the second of Henry VIII's six wives and Elizabeth I's mother, Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn has, of course, been an iconic figure of great interest for historians, poets, playwrights, novelists, and, indeed, for ordinary people, virtually since her death by beheading in May, 1536. She was accused and adjudged guilty of treason against her king - specifically of having committed adultery with at least five men, one of whom was her own brother and of having conspired with them to kill the king. All five men were also judged guilty and beheaded. The truth of Anne's and the men's guilt has long been in question and has been debated endlessly over the last nearly five hundred years.

Weir explores and lays out the available evidence on the subject in her copiously footnoted and referenced work. Indeed, the first part of the book seems a rather dry recitation of the known facts about the events. She makes extensive use of the contemporary accounts and sources that are still available and she seems to scrupulously try to avoid leading or misleading the reader to one opinion or another.

In the end though, Weir makes clear that Henry, who was still married to Catherine of Aragon, had wooed Anne for six years while wrestling with the Church over trying to clear the way to marry her and who had now been married to her for three years, had by 1536 grown tired of her and was ready to put her aside. This could have had much to do with the fact that he had fallen in love - or perhaps in lust - with one of Anne's handmaidens, Jane Seymour, and now wanted to marry her. It also probably had much to do with the fact that Anne had failed to produce a male heir to the throne. A few months after their marriage, their daughter, Elizabeth, was born, and since that time, Anne had had three other pregnancies (four in all in three years) but all three had ended in miscarriages. At least two of the miscarriages and possibly the third as well had been male fetuses. Henry had become convinced that he would never have a son with her and he was ready to move on to someone with whom he might.

Henry's Master Secretary at this time, the man charged with making things happen for his king, was Thomas Cromwell, of whom Mantel's Wolf Hall was a sympathetic portrayal. Weir's examination of the evidence has led her to the conclusion that Cromwell, seeing what his king wanted, conjured a way to bring it to pass and, at the same time, to remove the influence of the powerful Boleyn family. Cromwell, once a Boleyn ally, had fallen out with the queen, and, in 1536, he himself was not in favor with the king. Perhaps he saw the gambit of removing Anne Boleyn as a way of killing two birds with one stone, so to speak - he would do away with a personal enemy as well as again ingratiating himself with the king by removing the impediment to the king's desired marriage. Weir makes a strong case that the evidence against Anne may well have been trumped up by Cromwell to achieve his aim.

We can never know the truth with 100% certainty, but we do know that Anne Boleyn, an unpopular queen in her lifetime, accepted her fate and went to the scaffold bravely, always denying that she had ever been false "in her body" to her king.

In a way though, Anne had the last laugh. Public opinion which had been against her began to turn, especially when the populace saw their king marry Jane Seymour within ten days of Anne's death. But the lady in the tower's ultimate victory was achieved through her daughter. In Elizabeth I, perhaps England's greatest queen, a Boleyn sat on the throne of the country that had seen the first Boleyn executed.