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Literary Docudrama In The Classroom: Teaching With John Hatcher’S The Black Death: A Personal History, Ginger Smoak, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

John Hatcher’s The Black Death: A Personal History is an unconventional text. It recounts the experience of plague by a single, extraordinarily well-documented village in Suffolk, England: Walsham le Willows. While such a focus perhaps seems fairly standard of case studies or microhistory, Hatcher’s book is more than a narrow treatment of a corner of England. In a preface entitled “The Nature of This Book,” he opens with a discussion of both his journey toward the realization that he wanted to write a markedly different sort of treatment of the Black Death than present in extant scholarship and a rather …