The Black Death

A Personal History

By: John Hatcher

Narrated by: Geoffrey Centlivre

In this fresh approach to the history of the Black Death, John Hatcher, a world-renowned scholar of the Middle Ages, recreates everyday life in a mid-14th-century rural English village.

By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived - and died - during the Black Death (A.D. 1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the listener directly into those tumultuous years and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have experienced and thought about the momentous events - and how they tried to make sense of it all.

©2009 John Hatcher (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"This book uses a bit of fiction, mixing it with [Hatcher's] vast knowledge to illuminate that catastrophe." (Bookviews.com)
"The core of the story - the plague's effect on the lives of everyday people - is as true as can be surmised, nearly 700 years later." ( Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Pretty Dry for Something Called a Personal History

Listened to this during the coronavirus pandemic. It was very dry for something marketed as a "personal history" and contained less information than "The Great Mortality" by John Kelly. I would recommend the John Kelly book over this one. That one had both more facts and was more readable.

an iteresting and informative account

this book gives a face to counless numbers who died in the black death.d
one feels the strugles of the survivers as well as the overall social and political changes that followed the plague.

Obviously written by a Historian

Any additional comments?

As a whole, after finishing this book, I found myself understanding the Black Death from the ordinary people's point of view better, the fears and hysteria before, the trials during, and the fall out afterwards. There is a lot of humanity in this book. Unfortunately, the author is very obviously a historian first, and a storyteller a distant second.

Getting to the point often took longer then it should have. There's a lot of good information in this book, but you'll often have to sit through trivial fact reading and, often times quite literally, church sermons. Many of the points put forward are repeated several times, and some of it seems like the author is trying to work some medieval court records in. The introduction itself is almost an hour long snoozefest, and there's author notes before every chapter that often contain spoilers on what's going to happen in this chapter.

All in all, it's informative, makes you feel for the poor people who were so terrified in the face of something they couldn't understand or prevent, but it could've easily skipped or condensed a lot of the boring bits.

Descent book

If you’re looking for a book to introduce you to the Black Death this is a adequate one to start with. However if you have a fairly good grasp of the basic history of the Black Death you’re probably not gonna learn much more than apparently most people were named John.

The worst narration ever

This book has the worst narration I've ever gotten from Audible.

The narrator mumbles a lot of the time. I listen while working in the kitchen and/or house and to understand him, I've had to increase the volume well beyond what is comfortable.

I bought the book without listening to the sample. That was a mistake.

The content of the book appears so far to be great.

Informative on many levels!

This is a great read (listen). Hatcher does an excellent job of fleshing out 14th century Catholicism in England. He successfully portrays the efforts the Church and individuals performed to escape the oncoming plague. He then details the horror of the plague and its aftermath. He then shows how the nobility and the church tag teamed to keep down a rising peasantry who wanted more freedom and greater wages. This would be a great read for a class on the Middle Ages. The audible narration was also excellent.

good story

Where does The Black Death rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

middle

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

Any additional comments?

to much time spent at the beginning explaining to his academic friends that he was not writing a historical novel when he actually was. Way too much time.

interesting and thought provoking

Believable and relatable telling of life during the great mortality. I am going to look for other things by this author.

Beautiful narration for history geeks

This book is a brilliant mixture of fact and fiction, which the author Hatcher explains in his very frank preface, making it an award-winning history of the Black Death in Europe. Drawing from the unprecedentedly thorough archival records of a single county in England, this book will not tell you much about the 14th century plague anywhere else, but it does a remarkable job of describing it in medieval England. The narration is also very pleasant. Listeners who are not history geeks may find some of the story tiresome, overly detailed, or somewhat confusing, as Hatcher aimed to reconstruct medieval English village life as well as the plague's effects on it, but for a historian like myself this is a superb audio book.

A great way to enter into this period

The author established well his methodology up front, and did not disappoint, helpfully introducing each chapter with historic background to underlie the creative narrative to follow. His narrator stayed true to the period and, while the audio version is read perhaps a bit slowly for my taste, I was captured by the story and felt transported to the period itself. I do note some very minor deviations between the written and audio versions (quite unnecessary from my perspective), so be prepared if you want to enjoy both!