Tag: Plague
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A Brief Moment of History: Humanity’s Worst Year Ever?

Ask anyone on the street when they think the worst year in human history was, and I’m sure there’d be quite a variety of answers offered. Years during the World Wars; when the Black Death swept Europe; or even more recent events like during the Covid pandemic. War and disease are probably the most significant…
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Eyam: England’s Infamous Plague Village

In a world still reeling from a global pandemic, it can feel fresh to look at situations from the past that echo that which we have lived through the past few years. But a moment in history that has remained tucked away in my brain for years, ever since reading a historical fiction novel about…
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Fairy Tales or Medieval Reality? Historical origins of fantasy stories

You would be hard pressed to find anyone who did not grow up hearing fairy tales, especially after Disney popularised many of them for the big screen. Many of us are aware that the stories we see from Disney, with happy endings and mild scare-factor, often originated from far more dark and violent stories compiled…
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The Humanity of Manuscripts

Following on from my previous blog post, where I discussed the idea that the use of historical pictures in social media could highlight to modern eyes the humanity of people who lived long ago, I thought I would delve deeper into this idea by looking at examples from medieval manuscripts. During my Masters, I was…