compared with Professor X of Y University he seems a real professional …’. Whether their charity would have endured if I had ventured for a second time into their field, I rather doubt. I did not put their forbearance to the test, but prudently retreated to the nineteenth and twentieth century where I feel rather more at home.
One feature of my book which came in for some criticism was the chapter in which I tried to recapture the impact of the plague in an imaginary medieval village. Such frivolity, it was suggested, was out of place in a book which had any pretensions to scholarship. Historical fiction was historical fiction and evermore would be so.
I remain impenitent. Provided an author explains what he is doing and makes no attempt to confuse fiction with fact, surmise with certainty, then I believe he has the right to use any device at his disposal if it will help to make his point more forcibly. In the case of the Black Death, I did not feel that it was possible fully to capture the consequences of the plague on asmall, credulous, rural society without inventing a village and examining it under the microscope of the imagination. Statistics and facts alone, however striking, could not convey the horror that afflicted Europe in the mid fourteenth century.
Although I dealt with the Black Death in England more thoroughly than elsewhere, I tried also to give some indication of its origins and to sketch in the outline of its progress across Europe. The result was untidy but to have confined myself to England or the British Isles would have been to sacrifice all perspective in favour of a neat but narrow pattern. To deal with the plague’s progress country by country is in a sense misleading – the Black Death knew no frontiers – but no other division would have made better sense and a seamless flow of narrative would have inconvenienced those who like to lay down a book at the end of a chapter and take it up again without having to remember how far they have got.
There were other problems of construction, too. It would in some ways have been more logical to treat in isolation such subjects as the persecution of the Jews or the state of medical knowledge. On reflection, however, I concluded that the book was little more lucid and considerably easier to read if such topics were dealt with as they seemed naturally to arise in the course of the narrative.
Considering the fearful march of AIDS, particularly in Africa, and the failure of medical science to find a quick solution, one inevitably wonders whether a second Black Death could one day ravage Europe. On the whole it seems unlikely; enough is now known about the workings of disease to ensure that, though doctors and scientists will not always be one step ahead, they will never lag fatally behind. It is more likely that humanity will find other ways to bring about its own destruction. But if another plague, inexplicable, uncheckable, were to sweep across the world, people would not react so very differently. There would be the same mixtures of cowardice and heroism, panic and resignation, selfishness and self-sacrifice. An immeasurable chasm stretches between the fourteenth century and today, but the more that one studies the medieval chronicles, the more convinced one is that human nature remains substantially the same.
Mr Richard Ollard, the late Mr Handasyde Buchanan and my brother, Mr Oliver Ziegler, read my manuscript with fortitude and made many suggestions of great value. Dr Keele of the Wellcome Institute of Medical History was kind enough to read and criticize those sections relating to thenature and history of bubonic plague. Miss Barbara Dodwell, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Reading, corrected many of my blunders and pointed out a variety of ways by which the book might be improved. I have already paid tribute to the signal contribution of Professor Platt.
Any writer who has leant as I did on the work of other people must stagger
One feature of my book which came in for some criticism was the chapter in which I tried to recapture the impact of the plague in an imaginary medieval village. Such frivolity, it was suggested, was out of place in a book which had any pretensions to scholarship. Historical fiction was historical fiction and evermore would be so.
I remain impenitent. Provided an author explains what he is doing and makes no attempt to confuse fiction with fact, surmise with certainty, then I believe he has the right to use any device at his disposal if it will help to make his point more forcibly. In the case of the Black Death, I did not feel that it was possible fully to capture the consequences of the plague on asmall, credulous, rural society without inventing a village and examining it under the microscope of the imagination. Statistics and facts alone, however striking, could not convey the horror that afflicted Europe in the mid fourteenth century.
Although I dealt with the Black Death in England more thoroughly than elsewhere, I tried also to give some indication of its origins and to sketch in the outline of its progress across Europe. The result was untidy but to have confined myself to England or the British Isles would have been to sacrifice all perspective in favour of a neat but narrow pattern. To deal with the plague’s progress country by country is in a sense misleading – the Black Death knew no frontiers – but no other division would have made better sense and a seamless flow of narrative would have inconvenienced those who like to lay down a book at the end of a chapter and take it up again without having to remember how far they have got.
There were other problems of construction, too. It would in some ways have been more logical to treat in isolation such subjects as the persecution of the Jews or the state of medical knowledge. On reflection, however, I concluded that the book was little more lucid and considerably easier to read if such topics were dealt with as they seemed naturally to arise in the course of the narrative.
Considering the fearful march of AIDS, particularly in Africa, and the failure of medical science to find a quick solution, one inevitably wonders whether a second Black Death could one day ravage Europe. On the whole it seems unlikely; enough is now known about the workings of disease to ensure that, though doctors and scientists will not always be one step ahead, they will never lag fatally behind. It is more likely that humanity will find other ways to bring about its own destruction. But if another plague, inexplicable, uncheckable, were to sweep across the world, people would not react so very differently. There would be the same mixtures of cowardice and heroism, panic and resignation, selfishness and self-sacrifice. An immeasurable chasm stretches between the fourteenth century and today, but the more that one studies the medieval chronicles, the more convinced one is that human nature remains substantially the same.
Mr Richard Ollard, the late Mr Handasyde Buchanan and my brother, Mr Oliver Ziegler, read my manuscript with fortitude and made many suggestions of great value. Dr Keele of the Wellcome Institute of Medical History was kind enough to read and criticize those sections relating to thenature and history of bubonic plague. Miss Barbara Dodwell, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Reading, corrected many of my blunders and pointed out a variety of ways by which the book might be improved. I have already paid tribute to the signal contribution of Professor Platt.
Any writer who has leant as I did on the work of other people must stagger
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