Well, I've read "Fever, 1793", "Doomsday Book", "Year of Wonders", and I'm ploughing through the "Journal of the Plague Year" audiobook intermittently. I also posted an excerpt from Patrick O'Brian about Yellow Fever.
Similarities: this is blindingly obvious, really, but all the protagonists are survivors. I was really moved by the medieval chronicler quoted in "Doomsday Book" who watched and documented everyone around him die, then died himself. I recognise the writerly difficulty of writing someone who dies at the end of the book, but there's a part of me that would've liked to read it. Perhaps I should go dig up that medieval account?
Differences: genre, mostly. I've got a factual-sounding account that's only faintly fictional (JotPY), a straight historical (YOW), a YA historical (F1793), and a time travel book with a modern protagonist experiencing the Black Death (DB). I have Hambly's "Fever Season" out from the library, and that's a mystery. I found that the genre conventions were what made the stories stand out most, even more than the historical era in which they were set (1340s, 1660s, 1790s).
Wrt historical research and the author's understanding of the plague/pandemic they're writing about... the main thing I've noticed is that modern authors, who understand the germ theory of infection, have a great deal of trouble avoiding showing their knowledge, even if just by pointing at the historical characters and smirking behind their hand. O'Brian was probably the most obnoxious about this, with all his stuff about Stephen avoiding "miasmas", and Willis was probably the least, in that her protagonist was modern and didn't have that problem. She did have the issue of translating her understanding to the medieval people she was staying with, in ways they'd understand, but I thought it was done fairly sensitively (both internally to the story, in eternally wrt how Willis wrote it for our consumption).
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Similarities: this is blindingly obvious, really, but all the protagonists are survivors. I was really moved by the medieval chronicler quoted in "Doomsday Book" who watched and documented everyone around him die, then died himself. I recognise the writerly difficulty of writing someone who dies at the end of the book, but there's a part of me that would've liked to read it. Perhaps I should go dig up that medieval account?
Differences: genre, mostly. I've got a factual-sounding account that's only faintly fictional (JotPY), a straight historical (YOW), a YA historical (F1793), and a time travel book with a modern protagonist experiencing the Black Death (DB). I have Hambly's "Fever Season" out from the library, and that's a mystery. I found that the genre conventions were what made the stories stand out most, even more than the historical era in which they were set (1340s, 1660s, 1790s).
Wrt historical research and the author's understanding of the plague/pandemic they're writing about... the main thing I've noticed is that modern authors, who understand the germ theory of infection, have a great deal of trouble avoiding showing their knowledge, even if just by pointing at the historical characters and smirking behind their hand. O'Brian was probably the most obnoxious about this, with all his stuff about Stephen avoiding "miasmas", and Willis was probably the least, in that her protagonist was modern and didn't have that problem. She did have the issue of translating her understanding to the medieval people she was staying with, in ways they'd understand, but I thought it was done fairly sensitively (both internally to the story, in eternally wrt how Willis wrote it for our consumption).