The Black Death and the Ever-Present Judgment of God
by Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coalition:
Near the beginning of the pandemic last year, in the middle of that initial lockdown, I read John Barry’s The Great Influenza, the greatest single book on the flu that ravaged the world just over a 100 ago. Whenever I mentioned that book, people looked at me funny. Trevin, isn’t it weird to read about an older pandemic when you can just watch the news? Aren’t you overloaded with bad news already? Why revisit the tragedy of 1918–20?
I’m not the only weird one. Several people have since recommended Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of an epidemic in London in 1665 that captures something of the fear and isolation of the time.
I find it oddly comforting to revisit past plagues, perhaps because it gives me greater perspective so that I see through the silliness of describing our current moment with a word like “unprecedented.” When you look back to how your ancestors endured similar challenges, you find today’s tragedy less frightening. You feel a little less alone, and a little more grateful that you live in modern times.
The Black Death
That brings me to Richard Hatcher’s The Black Death: A Personal History, a book unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s a work of fiction that comes from the pen of an historian who has devoted much of his life to researching the conditions and the results of the Bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the mid–1300s, leaving an estimated one-third to one-half of the population dead. Hatcher seeks to inhabit the world of the 1300s, and he writes as if he were a scholar of that era who sought to recount the effects of “the pestilence” in a particular English town.
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