A Distant Mirror, a masterly evocation of the extraordinary world of western Europe between 1300 and 1450, has been acclaimed as Barbara Tuchman's finest achievement. She brings the insights of a modern historian to bear on the decades of Chaucer and Boccacio, the time of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death, of the great fame of Dante, of extravagant civilization and bizarre superstition, of pilgrimage and of plague.