Western Civilization I / Unit 12 WC1 1124 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Primary Source: A Plague Chronicle's Claims
The idea
The exam may quote a fourteenth-century account of the plague and ask what its author assumes. The method is three questions: what the author observed, what he explained, and what explanation was available to him. Boccaccio's preface to the Decameron, read in translation, is the case, since it describes Florence in thirteen forty-eight.
In practice
Apply. What he observed: swellings, then death in days; the abandonment of the sick by kin; bodies in pits; the collapse of law and custom. What he explained: the disease's arrival from the East and its spread by contact, which he saw in animals touching a victim's clothes. What was available: miasma, divine wrath, and the influence of the heavens, all of which he names without choosing. The exam's question: what does the passage assume. Answer: that the plague is contagious by contact, which the author observed, and that its ultimate cause is beyond him, which he admits. A distractor will say the author blamed rats or fleas; he could not, and the course's theory of video 1106 is modern.
Where people slip
Do not credit a medieval author with modern knowledge, and do not mock him for lacking it. The exam tests whether you can separate what the source saw from what it could explain.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it