Pearl

'My spotless pearl. I've gazed a hundred times at the place she left me, grieving for that gift which swept away all shadow, that face'.

How can we understand the way people felt about the world they lived in? Did people have the same emotions as we do? Did they feel the same feelings?

These are some of the questions I brought to my research for my book, in which I considered the impact of the Black Death on an emotional level. Evidence of human emotion can be difficult to access in the record. In more recent periods there are letters and diaries which can sometimes be explicit about how the author of these documents felt about the world. However this type of source is nearly non existent for the Middle Ages and other evidence has to be scrutinised. One of the ways I believe people projected emotion was in art and literature. A cultural tapestry of what living felt like, often slapped onto the walls of churches, in the chiselled art form of tomb monuments or inked onto parchment in prose.

Evidence of the core emotion, that I wanted to access in relation to the Black Death, was grief. Most analyses of this plague was empirical, factual. Or, it was from chronicle accounts which described the behaviours of the masses, but rarely individual feelings. There is a silence in the record where grief was involved.