The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, seven hundred years after the fact, retains the power to move, astonish, and haunt. After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, “This is the end of the world.” His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349.
