Episode Five: Plagues and Pandemics- Reflecting with Defoe, Pepys, and Hesse

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Grave marker reminiscent of the great mother archetype. (Photo by Alfred Reeves Wissen)

In Episode Five, we beagle about in a topic–plague–that seems very close to home, but at the same time will take us far and wide, all the while showing us the universality of human experience.    We explore the eerie similarities of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (published in 1722 about the last round of black death in London in 1665) and our own experience today with COVID.  Then, in attempt to plumb what it all means, we turn to Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund, with its exploration of creativity in medieval Germany includes a chapter dominated by an outbreak of plague.

Plague mask.
A bit of color from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, read by Andrew Cullom.
Both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys remark on London streets empty of carriages during the worst weeks of the Great Plague of 1665. (17th-century Flemish, by unknown painter)

More On Plagues and Pandemics

Discover Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.

Marvel at Samuel Pepys and his million-word Diary of life in the 17th century.

Explore Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.

Nine images of the Great Plague in London in 1665 (http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1052653, See page for author, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

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