This paper analyzes an excerpt from Jean de Venette's Chronicle, a firsthand account of events in Paris from 1340 to 1368 written by a Carmelite friar. The analysis examines how de Venette and his contemporaries — including Giovanni Boccaccio and astrologer Geoffrey de Meaux — explained the Black Death through religious, astrological, and supernatural frameworks. The paper argues that de Venette's worldview was thoroughly mainstream for fourteenth-century Europe, reflecting a widespread blending of Christian theology and astrology. It also explores how religion-centered explanations intensified existing antisemitism, leading to violent persecution of Jewish communities across Germany. Ultimately, the paper contends that de Venette's Chronicle is a valuable primary source for understanding medieval European responses to catastrophic plague.
The paper demonstrates effective primary source analysis by interrogating author bias — noting that de Venette's religious vocation shaped his interpretation — while also triangulating his views against multiple contemporaries to establish representativeness. This comparative method strengthens historical claims without overgeneralizing.
The paper opens with a biographical and contextual introduction to de Venette and his Chronicle, then moves through thematic sections covering religious faith, comparative perspectives, scapegoating of Jews, and astrological thinking. The conclusion ties these threads together by affirming de Venette as a representative medieval voice. Each section builds on the previous, maintaining a clear argumentative through-line from introduction to conclusion.
This paper analyzes a short excerpt from The Chronicle, a firsthand account of historical events in Paris between 1340 and 1368 written by a Carmelite friar named Jean de Venette. Though of humble birth, de Venette eventually rose to become prior of Place Maubert, a Carmelite convent in Paris. His Chronicle provides firsthand accounts of numerous important events in French history, including the Black Death — a series of pandemics that ravaged Europe during the mid-fourteenth century. This document demonstrates that at least some contemporary observers explained the Black Death in both religious and astrological terms. In other words, while this excerpt reinforces the stereotypical view of the medieval world as superstitious and ignorant, it nevertheless nuances this view by demonstrating that many individuals mixed Christian and other supernatural explanations for catastrophic events like the Black Death. This paper will further demonstrate that de Venette's ideas were thoroughly mainstream and therefore representative of typical medieval European thinking about the plague.
From the document, it is clear that religion played a crucial part in the medieval friar's life — a fact that should be considered one of the author's key biases. For instance, de Venette dated the start of the Black Death by referencing vespers, the evening prayer services that members of his Carmelite order would have attended every day, demonstrating the importance that Church ritual held for him from both a spiritual and a practical standpoint (de Venette, 48–51). Another, more direct, example of religion's centrality to medieval European life appears in de Venette's observation about how stricken individuals died. According to de Venette:
"During the epidemic, God of His accustomed goodness deigned to grant this grace, that however suddenly men died, almost all awaited death joyfully. Nor was there anyone who died without confessing his sins and receiving the holy viaticum" (de Venette, 48–51).
In other words, even though God appeared to be mercilessly — and randomly — killing people with a horribly painful illness, He was nonetheless still merciful enough to grant the sick an opportunity to confess their sins and receive a last Holy Communion, in the hope that this would allow them to enter heaven. Thus, despite the profound suffering and misery that de Venette witnessed, his religious faith grew stronger because he ultimately concluded that God was merciful. This demonstrates the importance of religious explanations for the Black Death to medieval Europeans.
De Venette was far from the only individual who sought supernatural explanations for the death and devastation surrounding him. Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio supposed that the Black Death descended upon Europeans either due to the influence of "celestial bodies" or "by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities" (Boccaccio, 5–11). Just like de Venette, Boccaccio saw the Black Death as a form of divine punishment for the collective sins of humanity — a divine "re-boot" designed to cleanse the world of evil and usher in God's kingdom on earth. As Boccaccio makes clear, human reason was insufficient to prevent or stem the Black Death because only God holds power over such an awesome force of destruction.
As both documents make clear, neither de Venette nor Boccaccio was satisfied with the post-plague world, but both ascribed blame to humanity rather than to God for man's failure to achieve perfection. It is not surprising that, in a world where religious belief was so pervasive, many people would also explain such catastrophe in terms of insufficient piety. Because the 1340s and 1350s were times of relative plenty — certainly when compared to the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 — it seemed unlikely that such a catastrophe could befall Europe naturally. Blaming God directly was not an option either, since God would not, in the medieval Christian worldview, choose to punish the good and the evil alike. Yet it was plain to everyone that virtue offered no protection against the Black Death.
Jean de Venette's Chronicle is an excellent source that illuminates a number of interesting aspects about medieval Europe's understanding of and reaction to the Black Death. On the one hand, the document reinforces the stereotypical view of the medieval world as superstitious and ignorant, but on the other hand, it nuances this view by demonstrating that many individuals mixed Christian and other supernatural explanations for catastrophic events like the Black Death. As this paper has shown through comparison with other primary sources, de Venette's Chronicle represents mainstream medieval European thinking with regard to the supernatural causes of the Black Death. In addition, the document illuminates how religion-centric understandings of the Black Death exacerbated pervasive European antisemitism, with horrifying results. Naturally, such a document raises further questions, such as why the Black Death encouraged rather than discouraged religiosity among medieval Europeans. All questions aside, this is a valuable document that sheds light on the ways Europeans understood and responded to the Black Death.
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