The great mortality by john kelly6/2/2023 “After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, ‘This is the end of the world.’ His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 13. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people-one third of the known population-before it vanished. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died how farm output and trade declined. The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history, even more so now, when the notion of plague-be it animal or human-has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern
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