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Originally Posted by Zombie
Oh, I see. I would love to take a class like that - what was your degree in, that you would have that class, if you don't mind my asking?
I always cry much of my way through the last quarter of the book, but I also marvel at the way the experience made history real for Kivrin, and by extension, the reader. At the beginning, before she's sent through, she's all about observing quaint customs and crop rotations and whatnot, like she's going to look at an ant farm and make note of where the ants go instead of living with actual people she might actually come to care about.
I think, for a lot of people, things like the Black Death are just ideas - really remote. We can read scary statistics and say, "Wow, that must have been horrifying," but it happened so long ago, we don't have a frame of reference for really empathizing with the actual people that lived it. And we see through Kivrin's initial experiences that the ideas everyone had about what it was going to be like were really wrong. The concept fascinates me, so even though the book makes me cry, I guess I look at it differently?
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It was a history class. I specialized in British and Irish history during the Early Modern Period (1485-1714), although this class spanned from ancient times to modern. For this class my own research centered on the plague's last major appearance in London in 1665(of course I also read quite a bit about the original 14th century appearance of the Black Death). 1666 is the great fire which destroyed most of the thatched roof,wooden, etc. type buildings, thus the fleas and rats lost their homes and ability to spread the plague to humans. New construction used better materials less conducive to rats and the disease carrying fleas living in the home.
Back on topic I just finished reading The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory. Historical fiction about Margaret Beaufort (Henry VII's mother). I would not recommend it. The author had very little to go on to make Margaret a compelling figure. Next book is Adam Bede by George Eliot. I've read Middlemarch, the Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. I love her novels.