Rachel Doyle

Professor Antonini

Social Foundations I     

        In the Wake of the Plague

The eruption of the Plague that struck Europe in the fourteenth century wiped out nearly twenty million people. According to a book by Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made, it was “the greatest biomedical disaster in European and possibly world history.” The Black Death, believed to be the Bubonic Plague, possibly mixed in with anthrax, killed between thirty and fifty percent of Europe’s population in the years 1348 and 1349. Religious leaders preached that the pestilence was God’s punishment wrought upon wicked people. The astrologers determined that the trouble was that Saturn was in the house of Jupiter. It is Cantor’s view that this failure of the people to locate the cause of the pandemic accelerated the birth of modern science and modern medicine. It also shook the basic economic and political establishments of medieval life to the foundations.

The Middle Ages in Western Europe were a very hierarchal, class-based society. The lives of people in the nobility were very different from the lives of people in the lower classes. The life of the aristocracy was one of very high income. They were very rich people and had vast income from their landed estates and from the work of peasants. They lived in large houses and were very contented.  They ate very elaborate food, guzzled enormous amount of wine, and dressed exceptionally well. Being a military society, the downside of their life was that they were frequently engaged in local, national, and international wars. Then the Black Death struck. The Plague was a “democratic epidemic” because it affected both poor and the rich members of society.

In 1347 and 1348, England lost 40 percent of its population. That is equivalent to America losing about 125 million people today. The Plague hit the working class and peasantry the hardest. But it also fell upon members of the royal family, the aristocracy, and the bishops. They had no idea that it was the rats that were spreading it. So those who were not in the prime of life were the most susceptible to it. But people of all ages died of the Bubonic Plague.

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Conditions in Europe had been extremely prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth century because it was a period where there was no infectious disease and the environment was good. It was a period in which the climate of Europe had warmed up one or two degrees. The summers were longer and the harvests were very good. There was no famine. This was an example of the Malthusian cycle. After 1300 there was about forty years of environmental change in which you had a deterioration of the weather. The weather got cooler. Most historians believe that this was due to ...

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