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Europe has experience two great plagues throughout its history. The first came in 1347, it was known as the Black Death. The second hit Europe’s most famous city, London, in late 1664 or early 1665; residents called it the Great London Plague. During these tw ....

Middle of Essay
.... of urban Europe (Vialt 6). One of the only writers to illustrate the horrors of this plague was Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio wrote out of Florence and described the “ravages” of the Black Death in the city (Drabble 113). The Decameron is a collection of tales that were “assembled in their definitive form” sometime between 1349 and 1351 (Drabble 260). In his “The Disease of All Diseases” James Fenton describes his assertions on Boccaccio’ s Decameron. Fenton is astonished at the knowledge that Boccaccio presents about this plague: “What he does know, although he doesn’t quite put it like this, is that the bacterium mutated in ....