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PART ONE: NARRATIVE ACCOUNTS The disease which swept across Europe in the late 1340s seemed to contemporaries to herald the end of the world. To the chroniclers of Padua the plague was a devastation more final than Noah’s Flood – when God had left some people alive to continue the human race [ 3 ]. On the other side of Europe, in Kilkenny, John Clynn left blank
From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349. It charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy. Focusing on England, an exceptionally well documented region, the book then offers a wide range of evidence for the plague's variegated repercussions on the economy and, no less complex, on social and religious conduct. It is concerned with the British experience of plague in the fourteenth century. Students of intellectual history will find a wealth of pseudo-scientific explanations of the plague ranging from astrological conjunctions, through earthquakes releasing toxic vapours, to well poisoning by Jews. From narrative accounts, often of heartrending immediacy, the book further proceeds to a variety of contemporary responses, drawn from many parts of Christian Europe. It then explains contemporary claims that the plague had been caused by human agency. The book attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind.
Introduction to the Historia Silense This is a deeply problematic text. Historia Silense (henceforward HS ) is the misleading name given to a composite historical miscellany whose main claim upon the attention of historians has been that it includes our principal narrative account of the Leonese monarchy between 1037 and 1072. Its interest extends well beyond this
This chapter presents translated and annotated narrative accounts on the topic of the plague in contintental Europe.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); I. Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Outside of IR the political geographer, David Campbell also touches on narrative accounts of identity, making theoretical capital out of the use of Hayden White’s work. In doing so, Campbell offers a gripping theoretical account of deconstruction. See D. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); D. Campbell
known and partially unknown, partially knowable and partially unknowable. Our accounts of ourselves are always already enmeshed with the accounts that Others might give. Thus, the mainstay of my existence is not autonomy, but dependence and interdependence in an inherently social frame. It is this very sociality that denies me my autonomy. ‘In a sense, my account of myself is never fully mine, and is never fully for me . . . If I try to give an account of myself, if I try to make myself recognizable and understandable, then I might begin with a narrative account of my
who took photographs of one of the people who jumped from the tower that night. I examine the ‘blackening’ of the community both before and after the fire and their ongoing search for justice and recognition. The chapter assembles traces from the public domain of what happened to Mwaikambo into a narrative account EDKINS 9781526119032 PRINT.indd 9 22/02/2019 08:34 10 change and the politics of certainty that points to the complexities of the interactions between individuals, the police and the courts after the fire, and highlights the inadequacy of procedures
up there for a variety of reasons, and not only or primarily because some people believed this was the best method of dealing with them. The experiences of illegitimate children, as evidenced in first-hand narratives, documentaries, and ISPCC case files, and Department of Health inspection reports, varied widely. The narrative accounts of institutional life reveal that the lives of illegitimate children could be filled with abuse, neglect, rejection, and instability. However, it is not clear how accurate or representative these accounts are. Undoubtedly children in
Almería in 1147. 1 To all appearances a contemporary (or near-contemporary) witness to the events it describes, the CAI furnishes the principal narrative account of the political and military affairs of the Leonese monarchy during the period in question. Despite its undoubted importance as a historical source, however, the Chronicle positively bristles with difficulties. For one thing, the text of the
This book covers one of the most controversial and shocking episodes in medieval English history, the 'tyranny' and deposition of Richard II and the usurpation of the throne by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became King Henry IV. Richard's deposition was arguably the most portentous event in the political history of late medieval England. The book represents all the principal contemporary chronicles from the violently partisan Thomas Walsingham, chronicler of St Alban's Abbey, who saw Richard as a tyrant and murderer, to the indignant Dieulacres chronicler, who claimed that the 'innocent king' was tricked into surrender by his perjured barons. Of the three most substantial contemporary chronicles which cover the earlier part of Richard's reign, two cease before 1397: namely the Westminster Chronicle, which ends in 1394, and the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, which peters out in 1395. Fortunately, the third, the Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, continues through the revolution of 1399 and well beyond, right up to 1420. The Lancastrian, French and Cistercian chronicles are the principal narrative accounts of the years 1397-1400, though they are not the only ones. The book focuses on the course of the Bolingbroke-Mowbray dispute, or his description of the early events of the 'Epiphany Rising'.