Eavesdrop On Experts

One of the things about literature is that it always responds immediately to what’s happening in the environment, says Associate Professor Justin Clemens from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. “People started writing responses to the plague immediately, but the most famous book is probably Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which was written after the plague in Florence of 1348,” says Professor Clemens. The Decameron is a group of stories united by the overarching tale of a group of young aristocrats who have retreated to the hills to avoid the plague. “They didn’t have Zoom, they didn’t have the internet and so they tell each other stories over the course of two weeks,” Professor Clemens says. Dr Suzie Fraser adds that the Black Death, or the Bubonic Plague, was also depicted by visual artists using representations of death, pestilence and disaster. “One of the most prevalent visual allegories that emerged in the Middle Ages was the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death,” Dr