“Black Death” through the Eyes of Contemporaries: An Attempt to Classify Written Sources

This article has analysed 124 written sources supplying information on the plague pandemic of 1346–1352. The sources have been classified into two large groups: narrative and documentary, with the types of texts of different origin specified within each group. Their analysis has demonstrated different degrees of informativeness and different nature of the accounts they contain. Narrative sources allow the one to reconstruct the geography and chronology of the Black Death, the reaction of fourteenth-century medicine, and the psychological perception of the pandemic by its contemporaries. Documentary sources allow the one to make a partial reconstruction of the socio-economic and political consequences of the epidemic. Both groups of sources do not allow objective evaluation of the demographic aspect of the pandemic. Additionally, the sources unevenly uncover the Black Death in different regions. The events of the epidemic in the British Isles are reconstructed in most detail.