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Essay Subject: Discusses four books on Middle Ages ([Chaucer] (Donald Howard); [Inventing the Middle Ages] (Norman Cantor); [Montaillou] (Emmanuel Lafurie); & [A Distant Mirror] (Barbara Tuchman)) & possible reasons for their popularity.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Discusses four books on Middle Ages ([Chaucer] (Donald Howard); [Inventing the Middle Ages] (Norman Cantor); [Montaillou] (Emmanuel Lafurie); & [A Distant Mirror] (Barbara Tuchman)) & possible reasons for their popularity. Paper Introduction: Publishing is a business dependent on the vagaries of public taste, and the best-seller list is the goal for every book published. Achieving sales sufficient to reach the best-seller list is difficult, and it seems to many people like only certain kinds of books get on that list, books with a broad appeal, certainly, which also might mean books that appeal to the sort of "lowest common denominator" that rules television. Yet, clearly this is not the case, since books of widely divergent types on subjects that might be considered difficult and even esoteric have become major best-sellers. The four books discussed here are all non-fiction books but are also from very different fields, and none of them involves subject matter that can be considered of broad appeal on its face or of immediate interest in the way a book on a current subject might be. Donald R. Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. He begins his book by noting that interest in theMiddle Ages extends beyond academia--he cites Tuchman's book, movies on thesubject, and other evidence. This is farmore than the other three books being discussed--Montaillou, published in1978 as well, sold 65 , copies. Howard does succeed in combining the two Chaucers intoone human being and traces the development of Chaucer as a writer even ashe was also the public figure who was in the service of the king. ." (34). Inventing the Middle Ages. DonaldR. A DistantMirror sold some 1.2 million copies after publication in 1978. The book is divided into two parts. The readership seems to find these same connectsand to see them as appealing and informative. The book covers all of Europeas an entity, showing the various forces operating in that region andbetween the different countries as well as Europe-wide events such as theplague. The appeal of the book probably derives fromthree important factors. All are well-written, but manywell-written books do not sell. Readers are giventhe opportunity to learn about the people of another time and the mode oflife they lived, and the story is told in an interesting and compellingfashion. Tuchman is a good writer who guides her readersthrough difficult material without losing them. These books managed to capture the imagination of readers.Timing may have something to do with this--the books may have come out at aparticular time when interest in these subjects is high. . Yet,clearly this is not the case, since books of widely divergent types onsubjects that might be considered difficult and even esoteric have becomemajor best-sellers. Howardfeels the need to justify his choice of Chaucer as a subject and says hehas had the greatest influence on English literature of all writers. The story is about the same period of time, but itis not told in the same dramatic fashion and does not center as much onbroad international issues. Second, Tuchman infuses the age with a sense of conflictand drama. The author also uses numerous divisions within chapters toseparate material and to give order to what might otherwise be toosprawling a tale. Of course, another difference between the mass appeal of televisionand the mass appeal of the book lists is that readers tend to be among themore educated in the population. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. One of the strengths of this book is the way Howard intersperses hisdiscussion of Chaucer's life with references to his poems which mayilluminate that life. She is also thorough andmanages in her writing to evoke distant times, places, and peoples in a waythat makes them live, and this is always important in appealing to thereading public. Tuchman notes at the outset thatthe kinds of turmoil seen in the fourteenth century have been seen in ourown and that other historians have made this connection. It is less clear why Chaucer achieved best-seller status than it iswith the Tuchman book. If anything is lacking in this analysis, it is because of theledgers that were lost. Yet, there is always a broad range ofbooks and subject matter on the best-seller list at any given time, areflection of the fact that there are many different kinds of readers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.----------------------- 1 Yet, all four were best-sellers over the lastfifteen years. One might therefore see her as having an advantagein that there is a recognition factor with her name on the cover, but thisdoes not explain the appeal of her writings in the first place. Thefourteenth century is far removed from the world of the real King Arthur,for instance, but popular depictions of Arthur draw inspiration from thefourteenth century and not from his own much more distant age. Perhaps the seeming contradiction of a man ofletters and a government servant appealed to readers as well.Montaillou Here is another book about the fourteenth century, this one set in amore specific locale than the other two books and also more concerned withthe commonplaces of everyday life. What these otherhistorians did not do was write a readable and dramatic account of theparallels. New York: William Morrow, 1991.Howard, Donald R. There is sufficient data in the existing ledger toprovide the anthropologist with much material for developing conceptionsabout the people and for examining all aspects of the life of the village.Because of the large number of people and relationships involved, theauthor wisely provides an index of names and of family relationships in anindex. It exists because of extensive recordsfrom an Inquisition brought against the people of the village ofMontaillou, a village filled with heretics who found themselves pursued bythe Church and who, when interrogated, revealed a great deal about theireveryday life as well as their attitudes toward the Church. The result is a unique book thatopens a window on a specific age in one specific place. He also uses this method to separate discussions ofpoems from biographical material relating essentially to the same period oftime. The sales on these books were sufficient to make them best-sellers inspite of their difficult and even obscure subject matter. After examining the stories told by these people, the authorrelates the data to theories of economic development. This might explain why readers tendtoward more obscure subject matter than might be sold to the generalpublic, but it does not explain why these particular books rose above theirrespective fields to achieve a special status. Not everyone is a reader, so the pool ofbook buyers can be characterized as somewhat different from how we mightcharacterize the general public. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. A DistantMirror was quite successful and achieved the status of being #1 on the NewYork Times Bestseller List and of staying on the list for over nine months. Tuchman further appeals to the reader with a certain attitudeof assuaging contemporary anxieties: "If our last decade or two ofcollapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it isreassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before"(xiii). In the second, the author examinesmore closely the details of everyday life as revealed in theinterrogations. She had achieved best-seller status with earlier historieson different subjects--The Guns of August and The Proud Tower. Tolkein, and he is noted for a literary work whichdraws on his medieval studies but which is in a quite different genre). The fact that this book can exist atall is also part of its appeal. The author tells the story of the founding ofmedieval studies in academe through the lives, works, and ideas of thegreat medievalists. Third, Tuchman makes an explicitconnection between this time in history and our own age, offering thereader in this way an experience of more immediate interest by telling himor her something about their own world. Publishing is a business dependent on the vagaries of public taste,and the best-seller list is the goal for every book published. Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror is a history of Europe inthe fourteenth century. Conversely, the reader interested in Chaucer'spoetry is given direct links between passages in the poems and events inChaucer's life or attitudes and trends in the world in which he lived.Howard also provides more explicit explications of some of the poems inlater chapters. One element that makes the story of these people immediateand real is that the people of the village are named and that their ownwords are used to explain their lives. He providesan appendix on a topic of particular interest to readers of Chaucer as wellas readers about Chaucer--Chaucer's language, a topic also of importancebecause of the degree to which changes in language influenced the course ofChaucer's literary reputation: "Between Chaucer's time and Shakespeare's,the pronunciation of English changed, so much so that Chaucer's poems nolonger sounded right" (513). In the first, the authordiscusses the geography of the village and the characteristics of thepeople as a group and as individuals--their occupations, migratorypatterns, shepherd's life, and so on. Works CitedCantor, Norman F. The author enables us to look back at thisworld and hear directly from people who lived there, and clearly thisopportunity captured the imagination of readers.Inventing the Middle Ages This is perhaps the most esoteric of the subjects presented in thebooks under discussion. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou is a historical andanthropological analysis of the village of Montaillou in southern France inthe 13 s. Tuchman also provides a number of illustrations in black-and-whiteand color as well as maps and charts that help guide the lay reader throughthe geography and the dynasties of the age. She bases this on her perception that the spirit of the age wastwo-fold. This may be the main reasonwhy these particular books have become so popular while others fall by thewayside. On theother hand, this was also an age of turmoil, dissension, war, andpestilence. There has to besomething in each of these books that strikes a chord with readers fromdifferent walks of life. If the book has any weakness at all, it is in the fact that it may offertoo much detail to some readers, but this is a matter of taste more thanfact. As is true of all the books in this discussion, Inventing the MiddleAges is well-written and readable. The life of thetime is evoked by the author in a more descriptive and less immediatefashion than with Tuchman, but Howard is a good writer who makes the storyinteresting and who also gives considerable attention to detail. That is, Tuchman's book did not appeal only tohistorians to reach a sales figure of 1.2 million. WhileHoward does not highlight the parallels that may exist between Chaucer'sage and our own, a number of such parallels become evident on closereading: "In Chaucer's younger days the English had more of a sense ofdecline. These books have all held a place on the best-seller list with otherbooks that more reasonably fit the idea we might have of a best-seller--sexmanuals, how-to books, books with cat cartoons, and similar "non-books" inthe estimation of many critics. Ladurie explains the origin of the Inquisition that produced thisinformation and the history of the ledgers in which this information wasrecorded. However, it is much more difficult tofollow than the other books because of the many different academics namedand the many different ideological and theoretical strains being traced.The story also involves numerous aspects of the history of this century,noting how different international forces and conflicts affected theacademic world. Norman F.Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages is a discussion of a number of medievalscholars of the twentieth century who are relatively unknown to the generalpublic. Howard's Chaucer is a biography and assessment of a medieval poet readby relatively few people outside college English classes. A consideration of thestrengths and weaknesses of each book may offer some hint of their appeal.A Distant Mirror As noted, Barbara Tuchman is probably the best-known of the authorsdiscussed here. One thing that these books do have in common is that they see (andpresent, either explicitly or implicitly) clear connections between thehistory they discuss and the present age, between the people they profileand the people of today. The four books discussed here are all non-fictionbooks but are also from very different fields, and none of them involvessubject matter that can be considered of broad appeal on its face or ofimmediate interest in the way a book on a current subject might be. Chaucer is certainly a well-known writer whoselife is less well-known, and this may have appealed to readers as a chanceto learn about the man. A Distant Mirror. The Tuchman bookmay have benefited from the renown of the author based on earlier books,but this is not true of the other authors. People looked back with nostalgia. He does precisely this with a large number ofacademics who are little-known outside their respective fields (probablythe best known is J.R.R. First, the book is very well-written, thorough,and interesting to read. The author provides a core bibliography in medievalstudies for those interested in pursuing these subjects further and topoint out some of the works written by the subjects discussed previously.The author makes it clear that the study if history is important and moredynamic than people may believe from the outside.CONCLUSION The question of why these particular books became best-sellers isimpossible to answer with any certainty. The information presented isdetailed and intimate, examining the sex lives and marriage customs of thepeople along with their work habits and religious attitudes. He concludes: "Ourdocuments have enabled us to burrow beneath the rich but superficial crustof feudal and seigneurial relationships which for so long, in the absenceof other evidence, nourished the histories that were written of earlypeasant communities" (353). Chaucer's reputation also suffered withshifts in political ideology. The scope of the book is broad, creating a picture of the life ofthe time and a real sense of the people and their mode of life and thought. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.Tuchman, Barbara. Clearly, the book has managed to appeal to a wide readership.Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer was another product of the fourteenth century, andDavid Howard tells of his life and his writings in this biography. An analysis of their content and strengths and weaknessesmay illuminate their appeal. Even then, a book must appeal to people outside a givenfield to be a best-seller. What he proposes is to examine the academicstructure of medieval studies and to show the forces shaping those studies,the arguments that help develop the field, and the men and women who engagein these arguments. It is thisreligious record that provides the data needed by the historian and shapedby Ladurie into a story utilizing the words of the people of the village totell their own story six centuries later. Oneelement that makes the story of Chaucer so interesting is also cited byHoward, the fact that the public man, the civil servant and ambassador,seems very different from the man we know as poet and scholar: "One couldalmost suspect there were two Geoffrey Chaucers, as in a metaphorical sensethere were" (xiii). The romantic spirit and the horrors of the age make aninteresting contrast and also add to the drama of Tuchman's retelling ofthe story of the people of the time. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. He uses alarge number of primary sources from the age as well as analyses by laterhistorians to give a broad picture of the man and his times. On the one hand, this was the age of chivalry, the age that hasappealed to people for centuries as the time of knights and glory. Barbara Tuchmanis probably the best-known of these authors and has had several books onthe best-seller list. Chaucer, from 1988, has sold 2 , copies, and Inventing the Middle Ages from 1992 has an estimated sale of2 , by the end of 1993 (6 , to date). As it happens, the four books share acertain relationship to the Middle Ages--three are specifically about thefourteenth century and one is about medieval studies--but no one canbelieve that books become best-sellers by being about the fourteenthcentury. A Distant Mirror is an in-depth study of European history and daily lifein the fourteenth century. Notevery reader buys every best-seller, and the number of readers required formaking a book a best-seller is much smaller than the number of peoplerequired to make a hit television series, where the audience is numbered inthe millions. Achievingsales sufficient to reach the best-seller list is difficult, and it seemsto many people like only certain kinds of books get on that list, bookswith a broad appeal, certainly, which also might mean books that appeal tothe sort of "lowest common denominator" that rules television. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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