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A Historian's Daring Use of Fiction to Tell the Story of the Black Death

Source: History News Network

Jul 13, 2008

Summary

My new book is not a conventional history book. It combines solid history with fiction. Having studied and taught about the Black Death for more than thirty years I wanted to find a new way of adding to our knowledge and understanding of this massively important but very well-worked historical event. I therefore decided to try to write an intimate history of the tumultuous years of the mid-fourteenth century seen through the eyes of those who lived and died in the ferociously lethal epidemic. It was to be a history from the inside, with the hindsight, overviews, judgments and perspectives of the twenty-first century historian banished from the text.

But I soon found it impossible to reconstruct in a deep and satisfying manner the experiences of ordinary people in the tumultuous years between 1345 and 1351 by using surviving sources in the conventional manner. For even the very best of the local records, including those of the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows that provide the foundations of this study, reveal frustratingly little in a direct fashion about what was hea Read the full article

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