In a remarkable synthesis of iconography and social history, Chiara Frugoni addresses the changing concept of the city as revealed in visual and literary images throughout medieval Europe. By exploring the sentiments expressed through the image of the city, she traces how notions of civic identity became fused in the consciousness of the people and in the daily flow of their lives. An examination of cities depicted in early medieval illustrations suggests a widespread feeling of insecurity, often conveyed through networks of bare walls marking the boundary between order and chaos. Analyzing chronicles and other historical texts, Frugoni shows that the strong relationship between cities and their bishops led to a consciousness of the city as a meeting place rather than simply a place to live under protection. As the religious and protective roles of the city diminished during the high Middle Ages and early Italian Renaissance, a secular ideology emerged, finding its expression, for example, in the Lorenzetti fresco in Siena, a political manifesto offering a reassuring view of Good Government in the city.

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary