Doomsday Book Medievial Fact?

Doomsday Book, Fact or Fiction?

In our day and age, movies and novels are passed off by many as history. Movies like Troy, U-571, and Enemy at the Gates (it can't get any worse than that) are historical inaccurate and at times horribly offensive. One must be dubious towards any form of entertainment with historical "facts" put out, be it a book or a movie. On the contrary, Connie Willis does a relatively good job of portraying the past in the Doomsday Book. She writes about traveling in time to the era of the Black Death and how it was experienced by the people who lived during the time. She discusses the plague itself, the religious aspects of it, and the hygiene of the people. For the most part, she depicts the past accurately as it was recorded by people who lived during the time.

The Doomsday Book focuses on the Late Middle Ages, especially the Black Death. Willis describes the path of the plague, the symptoms, the results and such. According to records from the past, she does this quite accurately. She twice mentions the three different types of plagues and discusses the differences between them. "There are two distinct types, no, threeÐ'--one went directly into the bloodstream and killed the victim within hours. Bubonic plague was spread by rat fleas, and that was the kind that produced the buboes. The other kind was pneumonic, and it didn't have buboes. The victim coughed and vomited up blood, and that was spread by droplet infection and was horribly contagious." (Willis, 324) These facts are definitely correct. The flea of the rat was in fact the vector of the Y. pestis bacteria which carries the plague. The Centers for Disease Control discuss the Plague in detail as well and say that "Plague is an infectious disease that affects animals and humans. It is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This bacterium is found in rodents and their fleas" (CDC)

Willis goes on to slightly repeat herself but still has the correct facts. "I wish I knew whether the disease is contagious before the symptoms appear and how long the incubation period is. I know that the plague takes free forms: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic, and I know the pneumonic form is the most contagious since it can be spread by coughing or breathing on people and by touch." (Willis, 335) According to the CDC, the Bubonic Plague was the most common form. The patients developed fever, headaches, weakness and typically buboes. Boccaccio describes what he has seen in his own time "in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils." (Boccaccio) The Pneumonic plague occurs when the bacteria infects the lungs. This type can be spread from person to person via the air. A person can get infected from coming in contact with the ill person or anything he has touched. Boccaccio makes many observations of this. He talks about the failure of physicians to clear the plague and the results of them trying. "The mischief was even greater; for not only did converse and consortion with the sick give to the sound infection or cause of common death, but the mere touching of the clothes . . . appeared of itself to communicate the malady to the toucher." (Boccaccio) Trying to help the sick would make the physician sick as well. The Pneumonic Plague was very contagious, even the clothes of those sick carried the disease. In the book, Kivrin is constantly telling Father Roche not to touch the clothing or the sick person themselves unless he could not avoid it. There was just case for this worrying. "Of this my own eyes had one dayÐ'...the rags of a poor man who had died of the plague, being cast out into the public way, two hogs came upon themÐ'...took them in their mouths and tossed them about their jawsÐ'...then fell down dead upon the rags with which they had in an ill hour intermeddled. (Boccaccio) The pigs died within hours of touching the infected rags. This was not an easy thing to contain.

Willis also talks about the spread of the disease, the deaths and the blame for the disease. "1348Ð'...The plague had hit Oxford in 1348. At Christmastime." (Willis, 314) Geoffrey the Baker chronicles the spread of the plague in his Chronicon Angliae which he wrote while experiencing it first hand. "The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in DorsetshireÐ'...From there it passed into Devonshire and SomersetshireÐ'...to Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England" (Thompson) The plague killed quick and spread just as fast. One could not hide, "There was no [safe] place. It was already in Bath and Oxford, and moving south and east to London, and then Kent, north through the Midlands to Yorkshire and back across the Channel to Germany and the Low Countries. It had even gone to Norway, floating in on a ship of dead men. There was nowhere that was safe." (Willis, 384) By the end of 1349 the Plague had done considerable damage in England. According to the BBC, it raged on in England and by 1950 between one third and one half of the population was dead. This fact is prevalent in the book as Willis states "Over fifty percent of the village has [plague]." (Willis, 360) She also suggests that "'The plague killed fifty million people,' Dunworthy said. Ð''It killed half of Europe.'" (Willis, 315) According to Geoffrey the Baker, these were underestimated facts as he says "and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive." (Thompson) These facts were merely one man's account, and overall her facts seem straight. The plague killed a huge number of people. "Eighty thousand dead in Siena, three hundred thousand in Rome, more than a hundred thousand in Florence. One half of Europe." (Willis, 318) After reading Boccaccio and Agnolo di Tura of Siena, one could see how these times were in fact very frightening. No one knew what to do, and most wondered why God was punishing them so.

The Doomsday Book also depicts how religion was involved in the Plague. It shows how people perceived God was involved with the plague. Once the Plague started killing many a people most wanted to know the cause, why was it all happening. "'Is it God who has sent [the plague] upon us?'Ð'...'Has the Devil sent it then?'Ð'...It was tempting to say yes." (Willis, 326) Willis goes far to depict how people viewed God and the Devil during this time. "During the Black Death, the contemps believed