I recently had the chance to talk to the sixth-graders at Friends’ Central Schoolabout the Black Death. I really enjoyed translating scholarship on the plague into terms that middle-school students would both understand and enjoy. Some of it is easy—Gabriele de’ Mussis’s account of plague-infested corpses catapulted[1] into Kaffa, for instance: The dying Tartars, stunned […]
In the preface to his The Gouernance and preseruation of them that feare the Plage, Jan van der Noot thanks the King and Lord Suffolk. In 1559 England did not have a king. A recipe at the end of his text for the medicine of King Henry prompted me to suggest that he was referring […]
In 1559 Jan van der Noot published a pamphlet offering his readers signs to predict an outbreak of plague, a list of causes, bedside techniques for comforting the afflicted, and ways of avoiding and curing the plague: The Gouernance and preseruation of them that feare the Plage. (available from EEBO if you are lucky enough […]
The Crossrail project in London is attracting attention lately for having unearthed numerous graves. Today reports claim the project has run into the tip of a plague cemetery. The Guardian states unambiguously: Seven centuries after their demise, the skeletons of 12 plague victims have been unearthed in the City of London, a find which archaeologists […]
The recent essay in The New York Times, “A Brief History of Panic,” highlights the ways that epidemics have caused widespread panic as well as the ways authorities have tried to control that panic. Such efforts are by authorities are by no means new but extend at least back to the fourteenth century. Town councils […]
I was thinking about my plagues and epidemics course and how to get students to think about the texts in new ways. I came across a post at Profhacker on using Wordle in the classroom, Wordle Revisited, that suggested creating word clouds for texts could stimulate discussion and analysis. Intrigued, I fed a couple 16th- […]