The Black Death: A Personal History

When it comes to historical fiction, everyone has their own personal preferences. For me, a historical novel should stick to the facts and fill in the blanks with well-considered, reasonable, plausible material. These criteria consign True Romance bodice rippers and lurid plots to my dustbin. Your mileage may vary.Hatcher has wisely chosen to describe the Black Death in a very real, specific context, with the leading character, Father John, as a highly credible centerpiece. No gripping plot here. Just a completely believable representation of daily life in an English village as disaster enfolds it. The primary role of the Church is entirely appropriate, since for most citizens of medieval England, there was but ONE Church and that Church had an outsized role in every aspect of life, from the nobles to the peasantry.For the modern reader, Hatcher brings us close to daily life in the time of the Black Death. Ordinary people, ordinary lives, overwhelmed a deadly, baffling catastrophe.

No problem with the seller or the arrival of the book, but the font size seems less than 9 pt. (In case you haven't noticed, you can't enlarge book pages the way we enlarge computer writing!)Yes, I can read small type, but this is a lengthy and dense book. I will have to donate it and get a different edition to preserve my eyesight!

I read this book hoping to understand the lives of medieval commoners and their society better, and I got what I came for. It was also an up close and personal literary experience of the bubonic plague, not just a historical overview. It was also an immersion into the religious life and mind of a devout rural community in England in the 1340's. I am more accustomed to an overview of history from a bird's eye view, but this visit was worth coming down to the ground for.

It's not the most interesting book, but John Hatcher creates an intriguing account of the Black Death in England. Unfortunately, while his account holds value for historians and is entertaining enough to suffice for an interested reader, the combination of the two means that the amount of detail contained on each page suffers a little; you wind up reading a lot of text to get less information than you would in a textbook, though it is certainly less intimidating and more enjoyable than simply reading a book. In some ways, the immense amount of knowledge in this book serves to decrease its value; it is very accurate and exacting account, with a great connection to personal lives of quasi-fictional characters, but its literary value is far eclipsed by its historical insights.Hatcher's work is great, but I just can't see it managing to stoke a new-found interest in history in most readers.

This really do a great job of illustrating life during the plague. The way it went back and forth between listing facts and portraying characters gave a realistic view of what it was like for wealthy and poor alike.

Considering this book is about such an interesting period in time, and approaches the subject with such an interesting technique of mixing narrative and historical record, it's amazing that The Black Death: a Personal History manages to avoid being interesting.Author John Hatcher takes a specific town in England and makes it the subject for a narrow exploration of the days of the 14th-century Black Death. Each chapter is prefaced by italicized historical notes giving some of the relevant facts. Most of the narrative that follows in each section focuses on a fabricated priest and his ministries in the town.Unfortunately, Hatcher seems to be intensely fascinated with the pageantry of the Catholic Church at the time, and the first full third of the book is taken up with laborious descriptions of the Last Rites and pilgrimages. While the townsfolk are certainly frightened of the plague that is rumoured to be approaching, the book barely touches on it and instead dwells on nearby monasteries or the like. While this might certainly be worthwhile in many other period histories - perhaps even one about religious life at the time - the constant fascination with the topic grows boring in short order, and never ceases to pop up to bore the reader with another display of pedantry.Facts about the town and the people in it are tossed out in the italicized factual portions with what seems little interest on the part of the author and no attempt to make them relatable to the reader. Perhaps the ins and outs of inheritance in a time of divisive patrimony are extremely intriguing, but Hatcher makes no attempt to show us the possibilities.I am very unhappy I spent any money on this book. I kept expecting it to get better, but it never did.

I had read about the Black Death before but it was usually general historical accounts about the extent of the plague, its symptoms, the death toll, etc. So dry. I never read, and always wondered, how did people cope with it in their day-to-day lives. This book does a pretty good job of examining the lives of real people, both those at the bottom of the hierarchy and those above them. The author uses historical records from the village and re-creates some scenes and conversations to flesh out the history. He says in his introduction that he was torn between concentrating on the history, or fleshing it out into an historical novel so it’s something of both. Lots of facts and some personalities as well. I learned a lot about 14th England. I had always imagined people’s lives would be in total chaos and had no idea it was so well-governed, or of the huge role that the church played in people’s lives. I’m glad I read it.

This part history part fiction was, for me, a new way of thinking about the black death as experienced by contemporaries. I was worried it would be an irritating mish mash, but with each chapter preceded by a lengthy historical description and a very understated storytelling style it worked well. It was only when reading the footnotes that i realised just how much of the incidents described and opinions uttered were verbatim accounts from contemporary sources. Well worth a read.

It's really a cross between fiction and history. because there is so little evidence from the time he has had to fictionalise it somewhat but it is still a fascinating read. I enjoyed and think many others would. Purist historians may baulk but he explains his rationale very well and it does bring alive that period on our history.

I do wish Amazon would tell us more about books we are thinking of buying! I searched under books suitable for children about the Black Death and this came up - but it certainly is not the standard of reading of 12-year-olds. I’m giving it to the charity shop.

We live in Walsham-le-Willows , and this tale of an earlier pandemic as it affected our village is disconcertingly apposite in local "Pan-Covid" circumstances. Essentially of academic interest, but the author (a Cambridge Academic} makes good use of the remarkable records that exist. Some are irritated at the "sexing-up" of the religious beliefs of the time in what is openly a work of fiction.

I seem to have spent a third of the book reading about how the church tried to stop the plague by telling the villagers how and what to pray. I'm not sure about the fictionalisation of much of the book taken from known facts. I'm looking forward to getting to the point when the Black Death eventually arrives and how the church explains itself then as to why God has forsaken His people.