Kilkenny, The Black Death and Friar John Clyn
"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, waiting among the dead fo...
Stay updated with breaking news from John Clyn. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, waiting among the dead fo...
"So that notable deeds should not perish with time, and be lost from the memory of future generations, I, seeing these many ills, waiting among the dead fo...
James Martin finds solace, ease and comfort in the equally pandemic-concerned fourteenth-century work, Bocaccio's 'Decameron'.
In Search of Precedent in Unprecedented Times Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons The first essay I wrote in Cambridge was on the Black Death. As I trawled through the fourteenth-century chroniclers, suffering from a dreadful bout of Freshers’ Flu, I couldn’t help but find descriptions of my symptoms wherever I looked. ‘For several days they spend most of each day asleep, weighed down by drowsiness’, wrote the anonymous author of a German treatise on the plague. That certainly rang true. The bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brinton, insinuated in a sermon of 1375 that my affliction was a pu...