In June of 1348, a ship arrived at a port in the English county of Dorset. It was one among many ships, insignificant in crew and cargo, but some of the crewmen were ill, and that is what matters. They were ill, and most likely died, and soon after the people of the town sickened, and many of them died, too. By the fall, many inhabitants of London had succumbed, and when the Northern roads softened from the winter’s frost, the people of Yorkshire were ill as well. It was the time of the Great Pestilence, or the Great Mortality; we would call it the Black Death, but for the ill and the dying—and for those they left behind—it was the end of the world. 

During the past year, I’ve read a great number of articles on the “Black Death” or the “Plague” (different illnesses, often lumped together) as we’ve reached into the past to understand the illness plaguing our present time. And while some provide edifying information on that pandemic, or graceful reassurance about our own, life after the plague is often glossed over. Authors seem to skip from the Black Death to the Renaissance as if to assure readers that human flourishing will certainly emerge from sorrow, but this simply isn’t true: the Black Death and the Renaissance are separated by a large number of attributes, including a period of about 200 years. 

But in the pages of a somewhat-forgotten (though professionally lauded) science-fiction novel, I found something closer to an assessment of the plague-ridden human condition. The Doomsday Book, a novel by Connie Willis that bears the same title as the infamous survey of England in 1086, may be about the future, but it has equally as much to say about the past. 

In the world Willis has created (centered on Oxford, c. 2058), time travel exists, but within strict limits. It’s glamourless, the purview only of bureaucracy-laden academic departments who use the time-travel “nets” strictly for historical observation. The nets operate under a set of clear, physics-like rules: historians can’t modify the past when they visit it, because the machines they use won’t let them. Time protects itself; travellers experience “slippage” of days or hours, whereby they are thrust a few minutes forward in time to avoid encounters in which they would be implicated. 

Kivrin, our protagonist, is an enthusiastic undergraduate. She’s the first to go back to the Middle Ages; to prepare for her trip, she’s spent years learning Middle English and Norman French, flipping through the manuscripts of the Bodleian Library and worshipping at the Latin Mass. Her mentors fret that the trip has been poorly-planned, that they’re sending her to a century that is a “10”on the danger scale, but she’s spirited, even as she tells a mentor to excavate the local churchyard for her bones—which, if the trip has gone wrong, would have been placed there c. 1348 AD. 

As Kivrin steps back into time and into the thirteenth century, disaster strikes in the twenty-first. The lab assistant collapses; in a world where everyone has been inoculated against disease, his forehead burns with fever. He is the first victim in a rapidly-growing influenza epidemic, an epidemic that severs Oxford and our crew of historians from the outside world. As university students and staff hustle to care for the sick and house the quarantined, another disaster arises. Kivrin has been sent to the year 1348. The Great Pestilence has arrived in England. 

Kivrin experiences the past as a “foreign country”, quickly realizing that everything—from her pronunciation to her dress—has been miscalculated. But she spends most of the book unlearning the niceties with which the historians of our time have cushioned the past. When she first arrives, for example, she repeats to herself a common assumption about medieval peoples: “they were incapable of feeling grief”, she recalls, because of the frequency with which people died. She’s spent years of her life trying to imagine what a medieval “contemp” would be like, but she’s done it all wrong, relying on fact and omitting humanity. 

The ”contemps” Willis invents are tremendous and heartbreaking. We meet a pre-teen girl who worries about the cruelty of her betrothed even as she plays in the straw with her sister, Agnes, a rosy-cheeked toddler. Harsh, social-climbing Lady Imeyne is always suspicious of Kivrin, but spends the plague days kneeling on flagstones, praying to God for deliverance. 

When the plague comes at Christmas, borne on the body of a drunken cleric, Kivrin is there. Unlike the “contemps”, she knows what it is; she’s inoculated against it, but unable to save any of the afflicted. They have, she remembers, already died—in her reality, they have been buried for 700 years. But that does not make her observations any less painful or the relationships she has built any less real, and so she toils away, bringing water and bedding to the dying and consoling the grieving. 

In Willis’ Oxford about thirty years in our future, illness is a rare occurrence. So rare, in fact, that when their pandemic begins, people cannot recognize the symptoms of a fever; they merely feel “off.” Even as people do begin to die and as supplies run out, the academics of the future are relatively dulled to suffering. Willis’ narrative descriptions focus on petty annoyances: the cancelation of a Christmas service and the dramatic antics of Oxford students shut up in the dormitories during the Christmas holidays. 

Christianity is a staple of both worlds, but in very different ways. The Oxford “inter-church” Christmas service is a recurrent aspect of conversations in the modern world, but it serves largely as a backdrop that connects characters to Kivrin’s place in the past. Despite the “laser-candles” on the altar, Kivrin is able to attend the modern Latin Mass to anticipate the medieval one. When the Oxford academics grow ill, they are read Bible passages by the chaplain and often request specific ones, but Willis concentrates any description of their thoughts about them on the parallels the scripture offers with Kivrin’s journey through the past. 

In the medieval world Kivrin occupies, Christianity is a complex cornerstone of life. Faith, Kivrin says, is more “real than the world itself” for medieval “contemps,” and indeed the edges of vision and reality seem to be less sharply defined. All the miracles of the text are real, for all that they are misunderstood. When the local parish priest sees Kivrin step out of time, he is not afraid: he believes she is a saint, sent to help the village through their time of trial. He repeats this even as the village sickens, as the children die, as the wealthy flee the disease, spreading it further into the countryside. A general notion about priests in the medieval period is that they fled the plague when they could, leaving villagers to die unburied, but Father Roche stays.

In Willis’ world, there is no sad or happy ending. The past has already happened; Kivrin is powerless to change anything about it. The book stops just short of her re-emergence into the modern world—her mentor has to go back into the Middle Ages and retrieve her—but had the story continued further, we might imagine that the power of her journey was a type of re-contextualization. She comes back bearing all kinds of useful information about the time period, but most of all, she comes back having survived the plague and borne witness to those who did not. Kivrin has no personal faith, but she uses her knowledge of the future to confirm the faith of others. It is not the end of the world, she says, and after this will come many beautiful things. Life will not always be so hard. 

Throughout the text, Kivrin “prays” into her hands, speaking softly into a recording device that captures all her observations of the past. It may be an aspect of her work, but it is something close to prayer in more than gesture. In her final “prayer” into the recorder, when she is alone in a village full of corpses, she whispers: "I wanted to come, and if I hadn't, they would have been all alone, and nobody would ever have known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were." She cannot save the villagers—they are, after all, long dead before she meets them—but she gifts them with love and attention and dignity. 

In the time after our own plague, we will each, in some way, be in Kivrin’s place. One of the gifts of Willis’ book is the ease with which she makes the figures of the past into people, people who encounter boredom and suffering and death, all the things that rarely make it into our factual accounts of history. It is easy to remember our personal losses, but it is much harder to make personal a great tide of loss; too often our memories act as “slippage,” keeping us from encounters with the deep reality of each other’s suffering. Kivrin’s example reminds us that there is little to be lost and a tremendous amount to be gained in the humble acts of service and listening; that memory is a burden and a gift shared by all of us.