Abstract
I say, then, that the sum of thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had elapsed since the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God, when the noble city of Florence, which for its great beauty excels all others in Italy, was visited by the deadly pestilence. Some say that it descended upon the human race through the influence of the heavenly bodies, others that it was a punishment signifying God’s righteous anger at our iniquitous way of life. But whatever its cause, it had originated some years earlier in the East, where it had claimed countless lives before it unhappily spread westward, growing in strength as it swept relentlessly on from one place to the next.
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Notes
Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) pp. 50–6. Boccaccio’s account of the plague is worth reading in full; only about one-third is quoted here.
Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; rpt 1984) p. 242.
See Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp. 47–8.
English Mystery Plays, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) pp. 404–5.
Medieval English Lyrics, ed. Theodore Silverstein (London: Edward Arnold, 1971) p. 81.
K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 211.
Cf. Sir Lewis Clifford’s will, reprinted in E. Rickert, Chaucer’s World, ed. C. C. Olson and M. M. Crow (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1948) p. 402.
See further J. Dillon, ‘Chaucer’s Game in the Pardoner’s Tale’, Essays in Criticism, vol. 41 (1991) pp. 208–21.
Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951) vol. III, p. 424.
R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) p. 305.
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© 1993 Janette Dillon
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Dillon, J. (1993). ‘This wrecched world’: The Obsession with Death. In: Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers in their Time. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22713-6_6
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