If you want a history of the disease itself and how it impacted European society, there's a new book by John Kelly called The Great Mortality that I'd recommend. It's a good summary of the most current theories and information, and Kelly's writing is very readable and interesting.
If you're more interested in daily life and what it was like, you might look for a copy of Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley for information about common folk. It's the kind of thing you can skip around in to find out things like how certain foods were made and what a shepherd did with his day.
Along the same lines, but with more of a focus on the upper classes, there's Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, or an older book by William Woods called England in the Age of Chaucer--both, again, very readable for the non-historian (like me!).
And really, if you just want some down and dirty facts to give you a flavor of the period (along with pretty photographs of re-enactors ;), look in the kid's section of the bookstore or library for titles by Doring Kingsley and Eyewitness books, and their competitors. Medieval Life and Living History's Fourteenth-Century Towns are both decent overviews. The latter has pictures of people dropping dead in the street, which is always entertaining.
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If you want a history of the disease itself and how it impacted European society, there's a new book by John Kelly called The Great Mortality that I'd recommend. It's a good summary of the most current theories and information, and Kelly's writing is very readable and interesting.
If you're more interested in daily life and what it was like, you might look for a copy of Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley for information about common folk. It's the kind of thing you can skip around in to find out things like how certain foods were made and what a shepherd did with his day.
Along the same lines, but with more of a focus on the upper classes, there's Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, or an older book by William Woods called England in the Age of Chaucer--both, again, very readable for the non-historian (like me!).
And really, if you just want some down and dirty facts to give you a flavor of the period (along with pretty photographs of re-enactors ;), look in the kid's section of the bookstore or library for titles by Doring Kingsley and Eyewitness books, and their competitors. Medieval Life and Living History's Fourteenth-Century Towns are both decent overviews. The latter has pictures of people dropping dead in the street, which is always entertaining.