1. Introduction: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 -- 2. The Pardoner, the Prioress, and the Pandemic: Jews and Other Scapegoats in Fourteenth-Century European Culture -- 3. Death and the Maiden: Mourning and Melancholy in Pearl and the Late Medieval European Elegy -- 4. The Plagues The Thing: Pandemic and Religious Politics in Shakespeares Drama -- 5. The Brown Plague and the White Sickness: Fascism and the Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Plague Fiction and Film -- 6. Conclusion.
Summary:
Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to plague writing from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human "hardware" has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present the human "software" has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern plague fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in todays America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.