What Is History?
Through the introduction of a completely fictional main character—Master John—the book consistently asks the reader to consider what is history? Or, more precise, what is a history book? It is merely a collection of verifiable facts and figures? Is history just data? If so, then the history of the Black Death as it pertains at least to the real town of Walsham can never be entirely know for sure since so many essential records were either never kept or have been lost forever. If history is just a story, then whose story and how much leeway can be give to the lack of veritable information. The author is here telling a very particular story—narrowed down to just this one town—but the story told and mediated by his fictional protagonist is constructed upon known facts and logical conjecture. So where does the history really end and the fiction begin? Indeed, can there even be starkly identified divisions.
The Church: Plagued by Politics
By making his fictional mediator between what really happened and conjecture the parish priest, the author affords himself the luxury of examining the human face of the pestilential plague from a position not restricted merely to health. The Black Death was not a just a health issue and there is even an argument to be made that it was more a religious issue than it was anything else. The temper of the times naturally drew most Europeans to one seemingly unavoidable conclusion: the plague was sent by God as punishment. The details of the what, why and who was really being punished varied widely, but the main issue was fairly universal. This became a huge problem for the Catholic Church as its corruption was unavoidably divulged and its inability to do anything to help humanity was impossible to disguise behind the pageantry of spectacle when rotting carcasses were littering the streets.
An Economic Epidemic
It was not just the sickness and death that was being transferred from one person to another and from one town to another and from one country to another. By wiping out substantial chunks of the population over very short periods of time, the plague also introduced a viral agent into an unfair and unequal distributive economic system that had become the way of doing things only by virtue of nobody being alive who ever lived at a time when there was another way of doing things. By the time the pestilence finally climaxed and ran its course, Europe needed rebuilding but the rich were poorer and the laborers were fewer and that combination always creates a little thing that Karl Marx like to term opportunities for revolution in the ongoing history of class struggle.
