In Our Time - The Black Death

Episode Date: May 22, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the Black Death influenced the structure and ideas of Medieval Europe. In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arrived at the busy port of Messina in Sicily and docked among many similar ships doing similar things. But this ship was special because this ship had rats and the rats had fleas and the fleas had plague. This was the Black Death and its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio who declared “in those years a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat”. In the long and unsanitary history of Europe there have been many plagues but only one Black Death. It killed over a third of Europe’s population in 4 years – young and old, rich and poor, in the town and in the country. When it stopped in 1351 it left a continent ravaged but transformed – the poor found their labour to be valuable, religion was both reinforced and undercut, medicine progressed, art changed and the continent awash with guilt and memorialisation. With Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London; Samuel Cohn, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow; Paul Binski, Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in October 1347, a Genuese trading ship arrived at the Visiport and Messina in Sicily. Readying to dock, it would have nosed in among many similar ships,

doing similar things, but this ship was special. It carried the plague, the blackest, death, cause unknown for about 600 years, but in the next four years it killed up to half of Europe's population. Its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, who declared, in those years, a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat. The black death not only massively reduced the population of Europe, it changed its economics and rearranged its society, but did the disease also bring subtler transformations in its art, its religion, and its intellectual outlook? With me, to discuss the black

Amir Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. Paul Binsky, Professor of the History of Medieval Art at the University of Cambridge, and Samuel Cohen, Professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow. Mirubin, can you talk us through the symptoms that people would have started to display in Messina? What happened to a plague victim? Well, the plague victim would have been someone who is bitten or attacked by a flea that is carrying within it the bacteria. in the blood within its body, and that blood would have been sucked out of an infected rat.

So there's a chain. There's an infected rat. The flea feeds off the rat. The flea leaves the dying rat perhaps to seek another more warmer, more attractive environment, and that can be a human. It can be also another creature, but it can be a human. And then when that flea attacks the body of the human,

it both removes blood out of the body of the human, but also it infuses into the body some of the infected, regurgitated blood that is blocked up in its own now ill body and injects the bacterium into that opening of that wound that's thus been created. And we just must make it absolutely clear to the listeners from the outset

that what you have said is accurate, but that was not known until the 20th century. Absolutely. They didn't know. So they had no idea about rats, fleas, anything like that, whatsoever. And that is a guiding factor for what we're going to talk about. They had ideas. They had ideas.

They didn't know about rats and fleas. They didn't know how it works at all. So we're in that context. Okay. Can you just, it's early in the morning, but go on. Tell us what happened when you got this. Just be as brief as you can. Now, depending where the bite took place, if it's in the leg,

probably it would travel through the lymphatic track, through the body's own systems of communication, as it were, to the closest, to the closest gland, the closest lymph node, which would be, say, in the groin. If it's on the arm, it will be maybe in the underarm, okay? And there, a nasty sort of inflammation will develop into what people recognize in the period as the bubo, the very, very nasty sign of a sort of very tender,

very, very painful infection that can be as large as an apple, they say or as an egg. And that is the site. It's accompanied by fever. It's accompanied by appalling pain. And the expectation is, well, it's described as causing death within about two days. It spread rapidly through Europe from, let's say, from Messina and Sicily, up north and west. Can you tell us how it spread through Europe so rapidly? The fundamental thing to remember is that Europe is a highly communicating and well-eastern.

sort of traveled continent. People are moving all the time. Not so much by the roads as we expect, but actually through water around coasts and through rivers. So it's extremely easy for it to travel. So for example, when it reaches Dorset in England in the early summer of 1348, it very quickly goes east and west along the coasts because they're such a thriving fishing industry. And indeed, the ship that comes to Dorset is one that's arrived probably from Gascany. So there is this tremendous connected as people are travelling by river, along the coasts, by roads, there are pilgrims,

there are traders. There are wars going on? There are wars going on, absolutely, and people are moving, absolutely. And of course, the sailors on the boats are absolutely crucial because they go to shore. This is what baffles me about the sailors. You've got the rats on the ship. You've got the fleas on the rats. You've got the sailors on the ships. Why didn't all the sailors die? How do the ships keep operating?

But they do die. And they do go. There is a standstill. And it's not, it's sort of 80% mortality on the whole is what sort of most people dealing with the demography of this epidemic would say. So there are people who survive. There's a long incubation period as well of a number of weeks. And, you know, like in all diseases, all the circumstances have to be right for it to become a proper pandemic. Samuel Caren, as a disease spread, did doctors at the time, we know it happened now with the basis of 600 years, hindsight, But did doctors of the time have any medical explanations in their terms for what was going on?

Yes, they did. The first thing they did, they looked to God, and after that they looked to the stars, and their explanations were at least in 1348 to 1351 during the first wave. They concentrated on what they called the remote causes, or the superior causes. When they got to natural causes, it was things like earthquakes that change the atmosphere. So then that created mutations in the air. They were very much based in a Hippocratic Galanic model, an Aristotelian model. But at the same time, they started to do things that were new.

One word that is not new to medical texts, but explodes in them is contagious. The whole sense of this being a contagious disease that they had never witnessed before. And in fact, when you read the plague tracks which explode in this period, it's really a new genre of writing about medicine. That becomes, some have argued, the first form of popular literature in the West. These tracks are very much distinguishing this new disease by contagious. as much as by the Bubos that modern historian have seized on and almost isolated out of this picture that contemporaries had. But what we would now think of as fantastic explanations too,

that black snow was melting mountains somewhere, that eight-legged worms were giving off such a smell that people died at the smell of the earth, and so on. There was a kind of, looking back and looking at it from what I've read from what you three have written, another thing, there was a kind of agony of ignorance, really, wasn't it? Well, this comes from the chroniclers, and that's true. The one thing that I think is very interesting, and perhaps you want to turn to this later,

is that these wonderful apocalyptic images that historians have then generalized as a part of this whole sort of late medieval, early modern picture and explanation of plague, is very short-lived. It's really only with this outburst of the plague, this utter confusion. And it's at this point that both doctors throw up their hands and say, we've never seen a disease like this before. This completely goes beyond anything that Galen or Hippocrates knew about or could solve. Ancient medicine is really of no use.

And the chroniclers are even more critical of the doctors saying, Matteo Valani, the Florentine chronicler, says, look, if you want to go to the grave more quickly and lose your money on the way, get a doctor. So there's this really bad press for doctors. But that changes remarkably. Let's not change it yet. Let's stick with the contagion.

Just give us some idea what I've read that we're talking about all sorts of violent things happened in the society at this time. Many, many violent deaths, bodies in the streets, mass graves. We're talking about you tell me where this is right. People, extreme licentiousness

because why not? Breaking law because nobody's going to catch you. and so on. Is that what's going on? Yes, one, you can see that criminality, for instance, increases, that particularly acts of theft are on the rise. The chroniclers all get on to this about that John of Reading, about these new forms of fashion, for instance, one that, where women were to bear their asses.

But this is part probably of this great reflex of the population to make good their losses to reproduce. And in fact, there are, there's what followers plagued, not only in 1348, but through the early modern history, is this rebound of the population trying to regain their losses by quick marriages. And this offends many of the clergy. and they, particularly when all these old men are marrying and going off with beautiful young girls.

Because it was no, it hit the country as well as the city, the old as well as the young, the strong as well as the weak, the rich as well as the poor. Nobody really knew what was going on. Before I move on to one thing, just to get the scale of it across. I mean, one of the chroniclers, one of the chroniclers says that most of Bristol was wiped out, and he gives figures, that out of a 70,000 population in London, 30,000 at least were wiped out. And this is going on in a two or three years span. It's going on in villages, because of little village tallies and so on,

in one tiny village, I can't remember you, 490 people, there can't have been all that tiny, minute, 490 people were killed, and so on, so this is the scale of it. Paul Binky, you're going to talk a bit about other sorts of consequences, how it affected other areas of life, and it's useful to see the arts because that's a well-recorded area, so we can look at that.

How badly, and that's moved with Italy, how badly did it hit Italian artistic and intellectual communities? Let's take Florence and Siena, for instance, at this time. Well, you must remember that there has been a splendid avant-garde in Italian painting for the last half century or so from 1280 onwards. So there is undoubtedly an impact in the short run, and also you're in a period around the middle of the 14th century when the avant-garde has stalled.

And central to the debate about the black death is, well, to what extent is the black death actually implicated in that kind of change. In immediate short term, what happens is that patrons and artists are radically affected by this. I mean, in the Italian cities, the urban commissioning elites are disorganized, reordered. There's the rise, as it were, of a new patrician class,

a new veerie class, who have new wealth, of course, because there is redistribution of wealth. There's quite clearly an end of large-scale commissioning so that the very grand cinematic fresco and panel painting cycles are the first part of the 14th century in Italy, which have instituted a revolution that later becomes called the Renaissance. That seems to fragment,

and so the pattern undoubtedly changes, but it has been changing, so that the black death is undoubtedly a significant contributory factor. Artists are killed. But do we find, Do we find visual evidence of the effect of the bag there? Do we see it in the paintings, in the sculptures, in tomb decorations, that sort? Could you give us some instances?

Sure. It depends where you are. If you're in England and you look particularly the evidence of building, Italy is a pictorial culture at this time, overwhelmingly the evidence is pictorial. In England, you know, it's a culture of sculpture and architecture. There's a kind of tide line through many great buildings that we know being built at the time at Exeter, for example, on the West Front. where the sculptures break off at a certain point.

In the nave at Tewksbury, you can see that suddenly something went terribly wrong in the 1340s. If you look at the documents for that period, the setting of the vaults went wrong. Pretty clearly the master mason, the staff left. There was a decline in the quality of work. Litchfield, other major buildings.

There is an impact. In Italy, there's a more interesting problem, which is that not only, as it were, the style, this avant-garde style seems to be changing, but there is a change in the, according to some authorities like Millard Meese, the great authority on the Black Death after the Second World War, Mies argued that there is a new transcendentalism, a change in the substantive change, in the content and religiosity of art,

you know, away with the humane avant-garde values. Let's get back to something more austere, more reactionary. And on the basis of that, proposition there has been much debate. Miry Rubin, people were not medically equipped to take this on, although they did various things, but they felt

they were theologically equipped. Can you tell us the reaction, which you, because I asked for a very brief outline of the shopping, can you go into what they thought? I mean, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but what do they think was happening? What had they done wrong, or what was God doing wrong, or what was going

on? God doesn't do wrong. That's the basic premise. But yes, No, I mean, there are two things here. First is, of course, it has to be because of sin. But can you narrow that down more? Can you say it's the general sense of the community needs, you know, to think about its comportment, its behavior, that kings have to be more just,

that justice has to be seen, that people have to go to church more regularly, or can you home in on particular groups? And those are the two possibilities. Before we home in on the groups, I want to get the theological reaction to it. I mean, did a lot of people think it was the apocalypse, going on? Well, definitely.

What writings prove that? Penitential activities, very clearly sermons as well. We have a lot of surviving sermons from England and from Italy, and it's very clear that it remains, and not only in the 40s and 50s, it remains a theme for the next few decades, about the presence of death, about the preparation

for death, about the non-deservedness, about the not-knowing of God's ways, but there's a sure way, there's a sure way of trying to protect yourself. There's a prophylaxis, which is, of course, heightened penitential activity. Now in Sam's Italy, of course, that really is refined into a tremendous movement. But even in modest England, people take on.

And together with that, of course, is the duty of remembering the dead. But there's also the duty of punishing yourself to try to appease God and the rise, particularly massively in Germany, of these great pacts of flagellants who trudged around barefooted and hitting themselves with spike balls, drawing enormous crowds like sort of football crowds, watching them, sort of bleeding and trying in their own. bodies to sort of to appease this

ferocious it's two things it's punishing themselves it's also imitating Christ but you're absolutely right that it's also very region specific what's interesting about England what we're concentrating on is actually these sort of activities did not take place in England it was not at all the religious style in England

what the English went for is commemoration commemoration and more commemoration all the dead that have gone you do pious works by praying for them and by arranging for their commemoration and that is where there's a tremendous link here with the art that Paul has just

mentioned. Samuel Coehan, as many mentioned but I'd like to turn to you on this. Different groups were to blame. Somebody had to be to blame and they started they were either fludgeon and thought we are all to blame and so we will

stand in for you all or but there were groups aimed at now can you just go through those groups? Well in some places there were the poor and beggars. In some places, even the clergy. In Sicily, it wasn't the Jews, but the Catalans who were massacred, not as great numbers as what happened in the Rhineland and parts of present-day Switzerland and Spain and parts of France. The Jews were the most

essential butt of this what is called hysteria. they were accused of poisoning the wells and poisoning the rivers. And it's absolutely, I mean, it's, because of that saying, it's appalling and terrible. But it is fascinating that, of course, Jews and Catalans, and the poor and the vagrants, were dying in equal numbers, and yet nobody took, they seemed blind to fact. Well, not the Pope. The Pope made this point and said, and in fact excommunicated those who were initiating these programmes, perhaps the most important one, in fact, was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles Voth of Bohemia. So people did think this.

The Pope pointed to England and said, look, people are dying there, and there are no Jews. He pointed to places where Jews were dying in great numbers, so why would they be poisoning themselves? It's curious, however, again, one point, that this really dies out with the first plague. You can't find this in later plagues, except it's interesting. When plague hits Poland in 1360, probably for the first time, there they go after the Jews, but the logic is different. They say that the Jews are dying in greater numbers. So they say, let's help out God and kill more Jews. It's interesting that's a tract by a Jewish writer in Spain.

Isaac Ben Todros, and he himself says that, I do not understand why they're killing us. Look at us. We're dying. Men, women, children, and so on, the exact same argument. It's interesting to the split, because it wasn't bottom up, was it? You've mentioned, the Holy Roman Emperor, who went against the Pope, and he pardoned people who attacked the Jews,

he confiscated their property, of course, of course, and so on. So it wasn't in that sense a popular movement. That's right. I don't think that this is one of the myths of the, of, 19th, 20th century historiography, that this was something that came from the ground up, peasants, artisans,

but in the sources, you don't see peasants and artisans. What you find, Castellans, you find counts, you find Duke Albreth of Austria, the ones initiating these programs are, in fact, at the height of society. They don't go

any further down than the notary. I would like to go into that further but we've got a bit more ground to travel across yes okay Paul Paul Binsky how did this a lot of people think we can see this transferring straight

into art with the dance macabre for instance now from you've written among those that had been depictions of that had begun little before this time but it then intensified now can you tell us the place of the dance macabre

and any other images that you could say came out of the play There are three well-known images that we would need to think about. There's this note of memento mori running through society at the time. You're quite right. The Dance of Death, the Dance Macabra is one. An overwhelmingly 15th and late 14th century thing. It quite substantially predates the plague.

Can you tell people precisely what the original dance macabra was, so we're all up to speak? The dance macabre is a way of demonstrating how death levels everybody by implicating everybody from the Pope downwards through the emperor and the king down to the the merest peasant in a dance whereby skeletons, cadavers pluck you and embarrass you by plucking you out into the dance and you have to skip around. Wall paintings of this subject were quite common in cemeteries or cloisters. And so that was a way of, as it were, showing,

what a democratic force death actually is. And it's an overwhelmingly 15th century theme. There are others. I mean, there is the emergence in the late 14th and 15th century of cadaver tombs, which, or transi tombs, as they're sometimes called, which are monuments in churches, which show sculptures of the deceased as a corpse in various stages of sometimes grotesque decomposition with worms and snakes pouring out of them and that kind of thing. Again, that kind of thing tends to be northern European and it tends to be elite.

I've got one or two things to qualify that later on. But the third thing is a thing called the three living and the three dead, which is a sort of Dorian Gray style encounter, as it were, where the three young princes go down to the woods and get a terrible shock because they bump into themselves as cadavers. They're bum into three skeletons. Yes, but they're mirrors.

They're doppelgangers. And it's a form of mirror-like doubling or self-reproach penitential imagery. And you mentioned the flagellants earlier on, linking all these things. But the quotation that comes with that is terrific. It's in Latin, but the translation is the skeletons say to the, to the, to the,

to the three young men, what you are, we were, what we are, you will be. As ye see me, so shall ye be, as it says on many teams of the period. Now look, a lot of these things are growing out of a monastic culture of the 12th and 13th centuries, which has a strong contemptuous mundi thing. These are not creations of the black death. I mean, the black death, you know, in terms of macabre representation,

there are pictures in Tournai and in Siena of helper saints, helping victims of the plague. There are images of showers of darts coming down from heaven to illustrate what the plague is. You know that it's a thing of arrows which strike mercilessly. Since Sebastian,

who is, of course, struck by arrows, is one of the plague-helpersa saints. These are all kind of macabre images. Christian imagery is deeply implicated in general in a culture of the macabre, I would argue, because it's a very bodily religion.

You know, central moments of a crucifixion, of a death, and so on. But the dance macawry is very much, along with those other topics, these are topics that are much more common, funnily enough, in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe. I don't want to be too categorical about that. And they tend to be slightly more popular amongst elites

in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe. But so we have to be a little bit careful about generalising. Mary, can I come to you about, can you take on from what Paul was saying, the changes in the attitude to death and the rituals associated with it, you were going in that direction anyway? Yes, no, it's really interesting because, I mean, Obviously a bishop can set up a cadaver tomb for himself

where a priest will pray day in, day out for his soul. But the desire to be remembered and to be prayed for is shared by all. So people are terribly inventive about this. So think, for example, the good burgers of Cambridge during the Black Death and immediately afterwards, so many of their colleagues have died, so many of their neighbours and family have died. What do they do with all of this? They may die for all they know.

So they set up a new form. So this is new interesting thinking. They're sitting in Cambridge. What do they see? Colleges. They create a college, the only college founded by townspeople rather than by aristocrats and kings and so on and bishops, for the commemoration of all those that have come before, all those that will come in the future in their little society of top merchants of Cambridge. So this enormous creativity in thinking of new ways of engaging between the living and the dead.

Yes, on this point on memory. burial customs changed dramatically, not immediately after the Black Death, but after the second coming of the Black Death in the 1360s and 70s. And one can see this in Italy and the Netherlands. That I believe it is a tremendous reaction against what was happening in 1348. Of these mass burials, these burials without proper rights, these burials which were ignomious, the reaction, and this sinks down in Tuscany all the way to peasants.

They want to have their memory, their individual memory, commemorated, and art comes into this. And you see this blossoming of small commissions for tin-lera altarpieces and column paintings, and most often depictions of the dead paintings. it in their very likeness to be remembered. Paul News. It's very interesting how the English evidence, I think, chimes in with that because the earliest English vernacular epitaph dates to the 1370s, and it commemorates,

it's outside Oxford, it commemorates a man called John the Smith. John Smith, we know from estate records, is a peasant who's struck lucky, because what he was able to do was to consolidate the estates of other people around him. He becomes a yeoman farmer. He survives the black death. The epitaph, which is dark and beautiful inscription,

talks about, you know, you can only lay treasurer up in heaven. Everything that's here, it belongs to other men, is other men, as it says. And the interesting thing is he's almost certainly killed off in one of the outbreaks of the 1360s or more likely the 17thes, and it had attached to it a cadaver. The origins of cadaver imagery in the immediate wake of the Black Death are, as it were, maybe bottom up, not top down. Can I ask you a specific question here, Mary? The English mysticism in the second half of the 14th century was extremely intense.

You've got Julian Norwich, you've got the cloud of unknowing. Do you think that was a direct consequence? Well, it's exactly as Paul said before. England is rich in producing wonderful monastic materials, really, from the 13th century on. But clearly, there is just that much more poignancy and immediacy and interest. So you can imagine a gentry family in Yorkshire wanting a copy of that manuscript because they are dwelling upon those issues.

Also, there's a great interest in prophets, in mystics, in anchorite, you know, not exactly the big monastic institutions, a lot of who suffer terribly in this mortality, but actually people who just exemplify almost in your own landscape at a bridge in the forest around your village, something of that consolation.

This massive attack on the population Samalko and had to be addressed. And so let's begin to look at that. The English government, in 1349, passed the ordinance of labourers. Now, they were obviously trying, what you tell us what they're doing. They're trying to contain it directive, weren't they? Well, I think, first of all, let's be clear, these ordinances of labourers to keep down wages,

as well as prices, really crop up almost all over Europe. There's certain places where it doesn't happen. For instance, there are no regional laws for the Netherlands. There's nothing in Scotland. And one wonders what difference did it make. But in a sense, what's happening in England, they're not just trying to keep wages stable. They're going back to 1346, which was a terrible depression.

And to then preserve wages at that level would really have been starvation. Was this because they're frightened that the peasants, given that there were fewer of them and Labor's more in demand, would ask for too much and become, that sort of thing. Yes. They're asking. Wages go up two and a half to three times in nominal terms, not in real terms. Real wages, that is what you can buy with this money, don't, in fact, go up above the pre-Black Death period until the 1370s or even the 1380s.

The big winners in this period are the ones who are being paid. victimized by the chroniclers and people like William Langland who says all these greedy peasants, you know, who are who are what fine French

bacon on their plates and won't settle for the old fare are just victimizing the nobility. But what George Holmes found in 1958 is that in fact, those who profit the most in

until about 1381, were, in fact, a big nobility in England. Because they were collecting more land. They were collecting more land. They were turning back the clock on servile duties. And also, through some effectiveness of these ordinances of these ordinances, the statutes of laborers, they were able to keep wages very low in real terms. So to continue that, Mary, I know you want to say something, but can you answer this question as well?

What you look, we look at, say, the mid-1350s, how, what, if you'd come back, if you left in 46 and come back in 56, 1340s, come in 50s, what massive changes would you see? What changes would you see? Well, first of all, the villages would have just, some villages would have had hardly anyone, but old people in them.

Old people and a few enterprising people. I mean, family collapses in a very, very big way, not only because people die, but because people are moving around searching for better arrangements for work, and that's particularly the young. So let's say in the first few years, total disruption. Food isn't there, food isn't being collected,

harvest, new seed isn't being sown, total disruption, therefore the prices rocket for a few years. When it starts bedding down by the mid-50s, as you say, and later in the decades, what you get is endless opportunities for those who are able to get up and enjoy them. So it might be a few. sort of top villagers in the village who have enough wherewithal to buy up all the empty lands and to rearrange the terms of their leases with their lord,

but the young and the able go into cities to employment where, again, they will earn higher wages. It is a real crisis in the countryside in terms of the breakdown of support networks that were really very, very close. Well, in this post-plague period, there's a movement towards, as Mary mentioned in the Cambridge, example, the founding of institutions, hospitals, chantries, university colleges. Can you talk about that a little? Sure, absolutely. In the province of Canterbury, for example, basically southern England, you do get new art genre that kind of grow out of this. One is a thing called the stone cage chantry, which is a small space which surrounds an altar and a tomb. And it's a new genre. It's an episcopal thing. The bishops of

Winchester like them very much. What's it for? A chantry is It's basically a form of endowment It's a space in which a priest Is paid to chant masses for the dead And particularly for the soul of the founder So it's premised, of course, on the doctrine of purgatory

This advanced fire insurance idea That you can get out of purgatory By having the living pray for you Once you're dead, you can't do anything for yourself So it's a bond of charity really And colleges, collegiate institutions in say Oxford and Cambridge are essentially academic chantries.

I mean, they're founded around the idea of prayer. Or Eden and Winchester as well. The great schools of the late Middle Ages. They're founded around the idea of prayers for the dead and prayers for the founder. And of course, you know, invested in that are wealthy individuals who can afford to undertake the foundations.

Are certain concepts, for example, colleges that are founded in the name of a saint or Corpus Christi, the cult of Christ's body, and, you know, guilds, which may be involved in that. and of course doctrines. I mean, doctrines about the relationship of the living and the dead. Samuel, can you maintain in your own, or you say,

that in the following decades, after the 1550s, let's say towards the end of the 14th century, if you don't mind me being a little general at this time in the programme. A sense of progress and even optimism grew. Could you define that for us? Yes, first of all, you see it with the doctors. As I said earlier, in 1348, 50, one, they throw up their hands. There's nothing we can do. But meanwhile, this plague has been

coming back, and the plague changes in interesting ways. One, the mortality rates, particularly up until 1400 and in most places afterwards, a decline radically. Is that because the plague's reduced in intensity? Why do the decline so much? It's very interesting. The plague comes back. You'd think, well, why wasn't it as bad as before? Are there fewer rats? What is it? Well, we could get into that. I don't think rats or fleas have anything to do with it. This is a disease, very unlike Yersinous Pestis, in which humans have a natural immunity. And you see this in the statistics. You see it with the burial. So people have developed an immunity. Two things happen. One, this radical decline in mortality. Secondly, from at least what the chroniclers tell us,

also a decline in morbidity. And thirdly, which is, I think very essential, is that that the disease the first time it hits is very democratic, not only in terms of social class, but also in terms of the age groups. By the fourth plague, where we can measure it in places like Pisa and Sienna, 88% of the victims of children, like other diseases that become domesticated, this becomes very heavily a childhood disease with these big hits of the population over a small period of time. Now, back to your question then, how do the doctors interpret what is happening largely with the human body? They assume that it is their success, it is their intervention. And I argue that the doctors are really the first in Western civilization to proclaim that they have gone beyond the ancients.

You go from utter despondency to utter arrogance in the course of about 30. years with doctors such as the Pope's doctor in the 1370s and 80s who proclaims that Hippocrates and Gaelin just left all this stuff in confusion. Our generation, because of the advantage of having

so many plague patients, we have now gone beyond the ancients and it's our interventions that are working. And you have doctors then by the end of the century bragging for instance one doctor in Venice saying of a hundred patients in my practice I cured them all because of what I'm doing.

There's definitely a paradigm shift in how they approach it by the late 14th, early 15th century the idea is not so much in the Galenic method to regulate the body in its environment, what you eat and so on but rather to say this is caused by a poison, let's find a poison against it. And they revive ideas from the 13th century like elixir, very close to alchemy

to try and find one, I mean, in a way, like some sort of, not a vaccine exactly, but an antidote really to the question of plague. But if you ask about the question of optimism and so on, which was the original question, I think what's really interesting there is that in England where it's heavily documented, we see real transformation, economic thought, in thought about how you use the resources.

If labour is so expensive, why have all these peasants working on arable? Let's turn our land into pasture. Let's diversify our economy. so landlords say, hey, I could have warrants for rabbits there. Rabbits did just get on with it. You don't need to tend to them very much. Or if I have maybe salt pans, maybe a bit of fishing on my river. Really interesting thinking, shifting from the one cash crop arable way of thinking

to diversifying and thus spreading the risk. It's a really interesting period in that sense. Did this plague, these plagues, undermine the authority of theology? I don't think it really did. There's no other game in town in terms of, I mean, it's a Christian story told with different emphases, perhaps, as we've all said, with penitential emphases, perhaps more critical, indeed, as Sam said, of the clergy in their usual ways, maybe more openness to inspiring mystics and super charismatic preachers, and more openness to that.

But still, the Christian story is the only game in town. Well, two points. I think you can say that in some ways it reinforces conventional belief. I mean, another thing that we should mention is that it has been suggested that there is an extraordinary increase in donations to shrines of the saints in pilgrimage. And you can tell that. An increase in pilgrimage. An increase in pilgrimage. Yes, I mean, as it were, the Chaucerian culture of writing about pilgrimage just follows in the wake of an immense increase in shrine donations. You can see that throughout

the 1350s. It's been charted by Ben Nelson. That's one thing to say. The other thing to say, I think, is that the sort of mid-20th century hypothesis about this, which Millard-Meese put forward, is that there isn't a subverting of Christian belief, but there is a change in emphasis, in other words, that you, instead of this loving God of the New Testament, mediated by the Virgin Mary and the Saints, which is such an emphasis of the first half of the 14th century,

you get a much more austere, reactionary, dogmatic, atavistic, punitive style of religion. So the style of faith undoubtedly changes, but I don't think there's, as it were, a radical subverting of its content. Samuel, Sam Cohn, after the, Black Death, there were a great number of increasing number of rebellions of what had been,

peasants as they were then called, let's say, what Tyler 1380 warned you. But he wasn't the only one, though, quite a few. Can you give us some kind of the weight of those in the context of the time? Yes, first of all, again, let's be clear about the chronology. The Black Death doesn't only kill people, it also kills off a rebellious. spirit that was just growing up in places such as Tuscany, especially among workers and artisans. The one thing that is remarkable of just how few peasant or artisan movements there are from about 1348 to 1355.

1355 initiates a new movement among artisans and peasants to, in fact, right their wrongs, to address the here and now to address the problems of justice, of not just wages or economic problems, but of entering governments. And there is this wonderful wave of popular rebellion and popular movements, not just the big three or four that historians tend to emphasize, the Jacari, the revolt of the Chompi and Florence, and the peasants revolt.

one can find a whole wave that they do increase and one can measure this by about three times per annum after the black death but not immediately after black death in the late 1350s. And I think this has a lot to do with this confidence, with this reversal to address problems in the here and now. Do you think that the black death can be sent to be a bridging time in European culture

that there was a real, it's set off, brought together, accelerated, a serious and then longer-lasting change. That's really interesting, because I think we've already mentioned a number of groups, deeply affected by it, the medical and scientific community, the religious community, the fact that people all knew about this experience

and could relate to each other, so they're travelling around and they see a chantry, they know exactly why it's there. But I think it's just one of very many bonds that Europeans share in terms of their experiences, which indeed, as Sam says, also manifested themselves in the frustration when governments did not allow them to prosper and to benefit from the aftermath of the Black Death.

Paul. In the short run, the Black Death significantly reinforces trends that are already existing in the visual culture of Europe. In the longer run, I am skeptical that it has what one might call causal importance. It's a reinforcing contributory factor. Would you agree with that briefly? I would agree with the first part, that not in culture, as one can see it, in particularly popular culture, that one can plot through numerous, in fact thousands of Last World's and Testaments,

little changes in 1348. But when the plague hits again, it's this continuation of plagues. I think it does usher end a new mentality and a new popular spirit. Well, thank you very much. Mayor Rubin, Paul Binsky, and Samuel Cohn. next week I'll be talking about probability. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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