Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself-a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant-was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before.
Curiously, the “phenomenal parallels” have been applied by another historian to earlier years of this century. Comparing the aftermaths of the Black Death and of World War I, James Westfall Thompson found all the same complaints: economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.
– Barbara W. Tuchman, in the introduction of A Distant Mirror. A book about the 14th century, it was written in 1978.
