Plague: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Slack Paul

Author:Slack, Paul [Slack, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The sufferings of the illiterate majority can only be glimpsed indirectly, but those who were literate found ways of expressing their feelings, particularly about the death of children. An early example comes from a letter to Datini, the merchant of Prato, from a friend who had lost his wife and two children in an epidemic in Florence in 1400. ‘Imagine how my heart broke’, he writes, ‘as I heard the little one weeping, and their mother not strong, and I heard the words of the eldest’ child, who said ‘he was called to judgement, and was ready to obey’. Three centuries later, similar statements survive in much greater number. During a plague in Barcelona in 1651, a tanner, Miquel Parets, recorded in his journal that he lost his wife, his two older sons, and a little daughter: ‘she was like an angel, with a doll’s face, comely, cheerful, pacific and quiet’. In a similar journal from Bologna in 1630, a glassmaker described how two of his daughters died, the youngest, an eight-year-old, raising eyes to heaven ‘so bright and beautiful that she appeared not sick but well’. When his wife also died he stopped writing: ‘May God rest her soul. I can write no more’. He died himself five days later.

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