Did people clap for carers during the Spanish Flu epidemic? Credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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Like maybe 98% of writers around the world, I’ve spent lockdown compiling my own account of quarantine restrictions: from the terrible non-haircuts, to the chorizo-fuelled weight gain, to the way I think I probably have Covid-19, throughout the day, right until the moment I have my first gin — all of this set in the wider, weirder world of shuttered streets, abandoned to empty buses and racing motorbikes.
When I began these corona diaries I decided I should put the pandemic in context — by reading all the available literature relating to plagues and pestilence. So I went online to do some shopping — and to my great surprise, the anticipated spree took about five minutes. Because when it comes to Plague Lit, there isn’t much.
Let’s begin with the most fearful pestilence of all: the Black Death. In the 1340s and 50s this bacterial pandemic slaughtered 30-50% of Europe’s population and similar numbers across most of Asia. It was the greatest calamity endured by homo sapiens since the end of the Ice Age.
You would therefore expect such a colossal disaster to generate a large amount of literature. It did not. Indeed there is one standout work: Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which describes, in the introduction, the assault of Yersinia pestis on early Renaissance Florence. Boccaccio, the middle-class son of a Florentine merchant, spares no details, and no citizens, in his prose: he tells of the buboes in the groins and armpits, as “big as eggs or apples”, then talks of the poor “dying by the thousands” even as the “ruthless” — i.e. the rich — decamp to their castles in the country.
It’s a small masterpiece of eye-witness reporting, but it is just that: small. Following this brisk prologue, Boccaccio pursues the rich people into the Tuscan countryside, and the bulk of the book is 100 ribald, funny stories told by 10 posh young survivors, as they wait out the pox. The plague is, then, merely a framework. And this is the book about the Black Death: the other contemporary accounts are minor diaries by physicians.
Can this paucity be ascribed to the illiteracy of the times? Perhaps, but the same fourteenth century produced the Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, the Chronicles of Froissart, and the Florentine scholar Petrarch. There was no lack of writers. Moreover, and puzzlingly, the bubonic plague was not revisited in later eras. Shakespeare was happy to write about medieval kings and their loves and battles: King John, King Richard II, King Edward III (who actually ruled England during the Black Death); the Black Death itself is ignored.
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SubscribeNice article, very well written. Just one thing, though: Covid-19 is not the plague. That’s why many of us are saying the response has been disproportionate to the threat.
Too true!
Good article and it certainly rings true for me. In early January BC (before corona) I started watching the Netflix documentary called Pandemic. Despite being interesting I turned it off After half an hour for being too depressing. When early March swung by I turned it on and forced myself to watch it!
One which has been missed out is the Plague of Justiniian, which ravaged the Byzantine Empire between A.D, 541-42 and killed around a third of the population. The Emperor Justinian himself caught it but survived. The plague recurred again a few times until A.D, 850, when it mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear in 1347-51 as a later iteration in the form of the Black Death, because in all cases it was the bubonic plague,
Well, there is Camus’s La Peste, and Manzoni’s The Betrothed has several very vivid chapters on the plague in Milan in, I think, the 1620s.
Not quite true about Shakespeare: he uses the plague in Verona as a plot device in ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
You also forgot to give any information about ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’. allow me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…