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Barbara W. Tuchman Books

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“Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.”

MortalityInnateChild RearingMaternal LoveMedieval Life
Book:A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
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“Two years later the logic of the struggle led (Pope) John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.”

Medieval HistoryOccams Razor
Book:A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
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“He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.”

ObjectivityStatesmanship
Book:The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
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“The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.”

HistoryFollyConservatismGuillotineHumpty DumptyReactionaryCounter RevolutionCharles XAhistorical Triumphalism
Book:The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
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