The Black Death Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

The Black Death - Essay Example Black Death served as a major turning point in the history of European civilization in that there was a high standard of living for the survivors, several problems arose for the clergy and nobles who apparently, were land owners as well as revolts by urban workers and peasants. The resulting high standard of living led to the more even distribution of wealth as well as the economic recovery after 1450.Popular uprisings were as a result of labor shortages due to death of the inhabitants, which made workers to demand high wages for their work, a thing that guild masters and nobles vehemently opposed. Secondly, Black Death severely exhausted medieval state’s tax base, causing kings to drastically raise taxes so as to meet chronic warfare expenses between England and France (Herlihy, 1997).Finally, the black death created problems for the clergy and nobles in 2 major ways; firstly the huge loss of population in the cities’ led to virtual collapsing of the grain markets, a k ey income source for church landlords and nobles having excess grain for selling. This particularly hurt the clergy and nobles who entirely depended on the land for income and wholly relied on the sale of excess grains in the urban centers for badly required cash. This led to the emergence of 2 main strategies for taking care of this loss in income; clergies and nobles resulted in the sale of liberty to their serfs, which raised quick cash, depriving them future incomes.

Eng project 2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Eng project 2 - Essay Example In addition, this can illuminate the many ways in which writers can come to vastly different conclusions regarding the relevance of a single particular story, even when confronted with exactly the same words on paper. An examination into how two different students interpreted the symbolism of â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† will demonstrate how even very similar ideas and viewpoints can lead to greatly different applications and conclusions. The two sample essays have many similarities in the way in which they interpreted some of the key symbols of the story, primarily the meanings of the wallpaper pattern, the creeping of the woman and the peeling of the paper, but the second essay takes these themes one step further, expanding the understanding of the story into a deeper context. In the first essay, the student interprets the yellow wallpaper as a thin veil meant to trap and hide the narrator’s true personality. This is extended to the polite society in which she lives, where her husband attempts to hide her encroaching madness in a quiet country house that is â€Å"quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.† The pattern in the wallpaper becomes the confining pattern of the narrator’s life as she maintains the schedule her husband has set for her despite her own objections and thoughts concerning her welfare. The pattern itself serves as the bars to the pris on she finds herself in, with a foreign pattern to them because they are not of her making. This writer sees the creeping of the woman behind the wallpaper to be the creeping of the narrator as she sneaks around the room, hiding her real thoughts and ambitions from the jailors that set this unnatural rhythm. Yet, the woman behind the wallpaper is seen also as becoming a different persona altogether, the persona of the woman’s sanity. The peeling of the wallpaper, then, becomes not only a freeing of the woman