Conclusion

This article asked what Thucydides and Boccaccio set down so that a later reader could recognise the disease each described, and what that writing can carry in the disputes over identification. Its contribution is a close reading of both texts in English and in the original languages, organised around the markers each author uses for what was seen, what was said, what was believed and what was left aside, and set beside the modern summaries that Skeptron wrote of each case.

Three findings follow. First, Thucydides wrote explicitly for recognition by a person meeting the disease again, gave causes to others, admitted that the account smooths the variety of cases, and closed with a warning that people fit memory to suffering. Morens and Littman's conclusion that the account does not allow a firm identification matches the text's own position, and the material dispute over Athens cannot be advanced or set back by the text. Second, Boccaccio wrote to be believed, not to be recognised; marked the strongest claims by the narrator's own sight; reported transmission by objects as what seemed; said twice that the sick and the dead were beyond counting; and gave a single estimate as belief, in a sentence that also notes the city was not thought to hold so many. For the Black Death dispute, the text supplies the kind of features Cohn's argument used and nothing that the London genome tested; description and organism are different objects. Third, translations move details that the disputes weigh, and modern summaries drop details that a reader of the records alone would need, including, for Florence, the existence of a figure for the dead.

The limits are those stated in Section 6.5. Two texts do not make a general argument about ancient and medieval descriptions of disease, and the modern records are summaries, not sources.

Further research could take three directions. Other contemporary descriptions of the Black Death could be read in the same way, with the same markers, to see whether the separation of sight, report and belief that Boccaccio makes is common or particular. Other editions and translations of Thucydides's plague chapters could be compared feature by feature, to measure how far the evidence of the identification debates moves with the text a reader holds. And the records of other cases in the study could be read against their source texts, to ask how often a ledger built on modern summaries codes as absent something the source text holds.

Appendix: the ledger's values for the two cases

The values below are from the study's ledger, which read each of the 89 records twice with the same automated coder. A value of unsettled means the two readings differ. The two cases are among the 23 that the study reads closely.