Chronicle (second continuation of the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis)

The author does not name himself. He says that he was born at Venette near Compiègne, and he writes as a friar, in Paris, of things he saw with his brothers: of a star over the city in August 1348 he says that “I and many other brothers” watched it. His editor, Géraud, identifies him as a Carmelite and argues in his introduction that he is the Jean de Venette of that order who wrote a French poem on the three Marys about 1357. The identification is Géraud’s, and the name is used here for convenience.

For the plague he is close to the events, though a note of the editor shows that this part of the chronicle was written down after 1357. He passes on some things as hearsay (“as is said”) and gives his own opinion on the charge against the Jews, which he does not believe could explain the deaths. The figure of more than five hundred dead a day carried from the Hôtel-Dieu, which stands in all the manuscripts, the editor thinks a copyist’s error for fifty; it is not used here. See the Black Death.