A Thousand Slayn
Barbara Newman: Ars Moriendi, 5 November 2020
Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England
by D. Vance Smith.
Chicago, 309 pp., £24, April,978 0 226 64099 0 Show More
by D. Vance Smith.
Chicago, 309 pp., £24, April,
“... you read only the poetry of the late 14th century, that the Black Death had ever arrived,’ D. Vance Smith writes. There is nothing in all English literature to parallel Boccaccio’s famous account in the Decameron. Chaucer, who had read Boccaccio and witnessed at least four outbreaks, scarcely mentions the pandemic. The closest he comes is ‘The ... ”