Jean de Venette's Chronicle and Medieval Black Death Beliefs

Introduction: Jean de Venette and His Chronicle

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.

Religious Explanations for the Black Death

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.