Sheilagh Ogilvie: preference

Transcript context

…Are there any fictional depictions of pandemics that you find persuasive? Manzoni, Camus, Pamuk? Anything? Even Boccaccio. Who do you think, “Oh, this captures it”? [laughs] Actually, I do think Boccaccio captures it. When I was writing the book, I kept on finding that there were passages in Boccaccio which exactly described what the historical sources were showing. He would describe how people in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death — the family, to some extent, broke down. People were abandoning their family members. They weren’t helping their neighbors. It was casting a dark light on the ability of family and community to cope by itself during such a huge crisis. Probably Boccaccio would be my favorite, maybe because he himself had experienced it. The later fictional accounts — they’re great literature, but I somehow felt that they convinced me less than a guy who actually went through it. [laughter] Who or what invented variolation?…

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