FREE ESSAY ON PLAGUE WRITERS

PLAGUE WRITERS

Europe has experience two great plagues throughout its history. The first came in 1347, it
was known as the Black Death. The second hit Europe's most famous city, London, in late
1664 or early 1665; residents called it the Great London Plague. During these two
plagues, there arose two men willing to tell the world of the horrors these two plagues
brought with them. Giovanni Boccaccio, in his Decameron told about the horrors of the
1347 Black Plague. Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year illustrating the
destruction caused by the Great London Plague of 1665. However no one really can attest
to the truth of both of these accounts.
The Black Death began in China early in the fourteenth century (Viault 6). The plague
then spread through the Euro-China trade routes and hit Europe in 1347 in Sicily (Vialt
6). The plague did not stop there; it traveled through Italy and soon spread to all of
the major cities in Europe. It is estimated that the Black Plague killed roughly 35-65
percent of the entire population of urban Europe (Vialt 6). One of the only writers to
illustrate the horrors of this plague was Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio wrote out of
Florence and described the "ravages" of the Black Death in the city (Drabble 113). The
Decameron is a collection of tales that were "assembled in their definitive form"
sometime between 1349 and 1351 (Drabble 260). In his "The Disease of All Diseases" James
Fenton describes his assertions on Boccaccio' s Decameron. Fenton is astonished at the
knowledge that Boccaccio presents about this plague: 
"What he does know, although he doesn't quite put it like this, is that the bacterium
mutated in the course of its progress.... The next source of horror was its speed - three
days or less between the onset of symptoms and death (48)."
Fenton also asserts that in his work Boccaccio did not care much for the physical aspects
of the plague as much as the cultural effects (48). Boccaccio claims that the plague made
people indifferent to things they once cherished (Fenton 48). Boccaccio writes of
overcrowded coffins and "heartless and immoral women" (Fenton 48). 
The Plague of 1665 hit London with fierce impact. In his work, A Journal of the Plague
Year, Defoe illustrates all of this. Defoe shows how at the onset of a plague, the Bills
of Mortality, which was a count of all of the people dead in a week, rose by six or seven
each for most towns 
Zafrani, Page 2
(3). Also, by the year's end each town's burial count was up to 349 and higher in many
cases (Defoe 4). Since this work is an autobiographical account and a first hand account,
it made it all the more personal to read, whereas Boccaccio's work was a collection of
tales. In this work Defoe deeply delves into the dismal everyday life at London during
this time: 
Many houses were then left desolate, all the People being carry'd away dead.... It was
said, how true I know not, that some of those Bodies were so much corrupted, and so
rotten, that it was with Difficulty they were carry'd...All the needful Work, that
carried Terror with them, that were both dismal and dangerous, were done in the Night; if
any diseas'd Bodies were remov'd, or dead Bodies buried, or infected Cloths burnt, it was
done in the Night...and everything was covered and closed before Day: So that in the
Day-time there was not the least Signal of the Calamity to be seen or heard of, except
what was to be observ'd from the Emptiness of the Streets, and sometimes from the
passionate Outcries and Lamentations of the People... ( 174, 186). 
Defoe clearly paints a mental image of the tragedies of everyday life in the town of
London during 1665.
Both Giovanni Boccaccio and Daniel Defoe depict some of Europe's most trying times with
both personal and impersonal accounts of everyday life during the two major plagues which
Europe has faced. Using vivid imagery, both create pictures of a time in which there was
a feeling of desperation due to the fact that there was nothing separating one person
from another. Any man, woman, or child had the same possibilities of dying the same
horrible death. Both writers display this very well.
Works Cited List
1. Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Louis Landa. London: Oxford
University 
Press, 298.
2. Drable, Margaret. "Boccaccio." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed.
Margaret Drable. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113.
3. Drable, Margaret. "The Decameron." Drable, 260
4. Fenton, James. "The Disease of All Diseases." The New York Review of Books 1 December
1994: 48. 
5. Viault, Birdsall S. Modern European History. United States of America: McGraw-Hill
Inc., 594