Beyond the economic concerns are the religious questions that seep through the story from start to finish. Hatcher is wise to transport us to the medieval world of Christianity by making a priest the main character. Through the eyes of “Master John” and the stories of his parishioners, we learn how important it was to help a loved one experience a “good death.” We get a feel for life in a world in which everyone was alert to spirits, good and bad, where superstition and magic mixed with Christian rituals and practices—a pre-Reformation world where bad actors preyed upon the spiritual insecurities of the townsfolk….

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.

As you’d expect, Hatcher’s book describes the preventive measures, the onset of symptoms, proposed treatments, and almost inevitable death that followed. But The Black Death also considers the pre- and post-pandemic lives of people in the countryside. How did they prepare? How did they cope? How did they respond when their loved ones died? How did rich and poor alike deal with fields lying fallow and cottages in disrepair? How did the town respond to the problem of whole families wiped out by the plague and the subsequent disputes over inheritance, and land, work, and wages?

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