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The Black Death: A Personal History

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Author: John Hatcher
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$27.50~~
Buy New: $15.48
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4 reviews
Sales Rank: 41242

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1

ISBN: 0306815710
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780306815713
ASIN: 0306815710

Publication Date: June 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080906212818T

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

In this fresh approach to the history of the Black Death, world-renowned scholar John Hatcher re-creates everyday life in a mid-fourteenth century rural English village. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived-and died-during the Black Death (1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the reader directly inside those tumultuous times and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have felt and thought about these momentous events: what they knew and didn’t know about the horrors of the disease, what they believed about death and God’s vengeance, and how they tried to make sense of it all despite frantic rumors, frightening tales, and fearful sermons.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

A Better Understanding of the Plague and its Impact August 6, 2008
Hatcher's fictional scenes and characters are well rooted in actual events in a typical medieval village as the Black Death looms large over Walsham's inhabitants. What would it be like to hear about the plague a year before it came to your home town and how would people react to impending doom. A great way to capture and understand the distant past.

4 out of 5 stars

Good book, but did you know part is fiction? July 20, 2008
I was told that this book was non-fiction. However, as I am reading 1/2 way through it, I realized it is mostly non-fiction with some parts being made up. Still a very interested read.

5 out of 5 stars

Could not put it down July 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I can't put this book down. Told with historical accuracy from the point of view of a fictional minister, The Black Death is the perfect mixture of fact and fancy--of scholarship and storytelling. Brilliant, brilliant book.

5 out of 5 stars

As If a Reporter Were on the Scene June 18, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

The Black Death continues to fascinate us, even though it took its great toll on Europe in the fourteenth century. There have been scores of books about it. One of the world's experts on the plague, John Hatcher, is a professor at the University of Cambridge. He has written a great deal about medieval history and about the Black Death in particular, but has taken a completely new method in _The Black Death: A Personal History_ (Da Capo Press). There are first person accounts of the plague in Boccaccio and Petrarch, and there are plenty of records about how the plague raged through Britain, but there isn't a comparable story-telling description for Britain. Until now, for Hatcher has written one. He has chosen the locale of Walsham le Willows, a Suffolk town that has many good records for the years of the plague, but he explains, "Even in the best documented of places, the sources surviving from the fourteenth century are silent, or severely deficient, on most of the issues that were central to the lives of the villagers. There are no diaries, reminiscences, or correspondence, and no accounts of what people believed or how they spent their days." He feels, however, that "... this does not mean that historians should give up and leave the telling of it to novelists, dramatists, and filmmakers."

The result is a book for which, Hatcher says, "I have had to invent situations and dialogue and employ techniques reminiscent of docudrama." He has had also to invent characters, such as Master John, the parish priest of Walsham. The result is not really a historical novel; there is little character development or plot. As befits the work of a historian, this is more of a history, as if there were a reporter there at the time to interview characters and describe what was going on. Much centers on the idea that God was punishing those other villages, but Master John taught that he would spare those in Walsham who showed that they deserved mercy by acts of confession and public and private abasement. There was no way to understand the disease except as a message and punishment from God, but as the illness worked its way into the land, there were many who questioned how God could be treating them in this way. Sinless infants fell to it, as did the devout, as did many a sincere priest. Also mystifying was that the great pestilence God had wrought for the sins of the people led to no improvement of their behavior or their lot in any social stratum. In Walsham, as in other areas, the death toll was around 50%, and the loss of population created economic and social chaos. Hatcher vividly describes the frustrations of the likes of the lordly master of Walsham's High Hall, who found that those who had toiled for the manor for centuries now discovered themselves a scarce resource so that they could demand high wages. The plague also raised the ire of the lords and the clergy when the survivors, widows, and widowers quickly took up new partners, often cohabiting without benefit of marriage. Such behavior was not only sinful, it robbed officials of marriage fees due to the manor.

Hatcher's experiment in telling a social history using fiction based on a historical foundation is a success. He has not only told about what the villagers were going through during the terror, but has cleverly called upon other sources to come in and give background information. For instance, Master John rides to the town of Bury St. Edmunds to speak at the abbey there with his friend the infirmarer, the medical authority for the monks. He thus gets an earful of how physicians at the time explained the disease, although they had no more effect against it than religious authorities. In another section, a carter regales the crowd at Alice Pye's alehouse with a description of the appearance and behavior of a procession of flagellants he has seen, come to London from across the channel to whip themselves bloody so that the plague would be cast out of the land. The details provided here give an unforgettable picture of a society thrown into chaos by microbes, and it is not too far a stretch to think that we might in our own way go through the same sorts of responses to the chaos when the new SARS or Ebola comes for us.

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