Source Evaluation: Excerpt from "Chronicle" by Jean de Venette
This passage is an extracted from a Chronicle, written by Jean de Venette, a French religious leader and a chronicler from 1307 to 1370, which records events in France from 1340 to 1368. It describes how the Plague (Black Death) spread and people’s reactions. It also described what people at that time thought were the causes of the Plague and the effect of that understanding of the Plague.
Jean de Venette was probably an educated and rich person as literacy wasky only starting to become popular amongst wealthy laypeople in early 14th Century and yet he was able to write a Chronicle and record history at that time. As his name suggested, he is from Venette, a city in France. He is most likely to be from a city when he wrote this source. This passage is a primary source as it was written at the time the Plague strike France, and the author was an eyewitness to this event himself.
As mentioned, this passage was an extract from a Chronicle, which was written to record events, the Chronicle written by Jean de Venette records what had happened from 1340-1368. The target audience for this source was unknown, but historians would find it useful to know what happened and how people reacted to events in France in the 14th Century.
This source was useful because the author was an eyewitness of the Plague and therefore the event recorded in this passage is first-hand information from that time. The passage was taken from a chronicle, a record of history, so the information reported in it should be quite accurate. This source also described in details what people thought were the cause of the Plague.
There were also limitations of this source as it only discussed several aspects of the Plague, focusing in how people at that time thought the Plague spread, but not other areas, like the how people lived after the Plague stoke France, how people dealt with it etc. Also, it only record of what had happened in France, and not other countries where the Plague spread
Jean de Venette was probably an educated and rich person as literacy wasky only starting to become popular amongst wealthy laypeople in early 14th Century and yet he was able to write a Chronicle and record history at that time. As his name suggested, he is from Venette, a city in France. He is most likely to be from a city when he wrote this source. This passage is a primary source as it was written at the time the Plague strike France, and the author was an eyewitness to this event himself.
As mentioned, this passage was an extract from a Chronicle, which was written to record events, the Chronicle written by Jean de Venette records what had happened from 1340-1368. The target audience for this source was unknown, but historians would find it useful to know what happened and how people reacted to events in France in the 14th Century.
This source was useful because the author was an eyewitness of the Plague and therefore the event recorded in this passage is first-hand information from that time. The passage was taken from a chronicle, a record of history, so the information reported in it should be quite accurate. This source also described in details what people thought were the cause of the Plague.
There were also limitations of this source as it only discussed several aspects of the Plague, focusing in how people at that time thought the Plague spread, but not other areas, like the how people lived after the Plague stoke France, how people dealt with it etc. Also, it only record of what had happened in France, and not other countries where the Plague spread