Reactions to the Plague and Other Events

When examining the reactions of the Black Death in Europe, we must remember the amount of death involved. Europe’s population was reduced by over 70 million people in the space of five years. Reactions to this onslaught were varied and unpredictable. There was no enemy to fight against. There was no one to take vengeance upon for the disease. Europe was completely helpless in the face of this faceless killer that had no respect for class, station, birth, or religion. In light of this, it should not surprise us to find that reactions included explanations from religious experience, a denial of traditional mores and social customs, and scapegoating.
“See how England mourns, drenched in tears. The people stained by sin, quake with grief. Plague is killing men and beasts. Why? Because vices rule unchallenged here.”[1] Reactions like this were fueled by traditional understandings of God and the universe; medieval understandings. The people of the medieval world, more so than we, tended to think of every event as part of God’s unfolding plan for His universe. Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic theology of the High and Later Middle Ages caused them to see themselves as perpetually under the divine wrath of God and that He was just looking for a good excuse to pour that wrath out on humanity. Religious interpretation of the plagues cause also sparked reactions like the flagellants: people who went about with whips (flagella) with which they “beat and whipped their bare skin until their bodies were bruised and swollen and blood rained down, spattering their walls nearby.”[2] They did this as an act of public penance for the sins that brought about the plague. As can be imagined, the amount of death present in Europe brought concerns about the end of the world. There was no lack of millennialism to account for the events surrounding the bubonic plague. There were rumors in 1349 that Antichrist had appeared and was even then a boy about ten years old.[3]
Many abandoned the traditional religious interpretation and the social structure established by Christianity in light of the plague. Looking around at the death around them and the powerlessness of established authority (ecclesiastical or secular) to control the plague, many began living for the moment, considering they could die at any moment. They completely gave themselves over to hedonism, forgetting that the trials of this life are used to purify the soul. They indulged in alcohol and sexual immorality.
Scientific reactions ranged from astrological explanations concerning the positions of all the planets at the time the plague broke out to theories about the content of the air being poisonous. Germ theory and basic sanitation to avoid infectious disease were a long way off at this point. We must admire these people for attempting an explanation even as we snicker at the absurd things they came up with.
Other reactions included flight from the heavily populated cities. The fourteenth-century writer Giovanni Boccacio captured much of this in his great work the Decameron. The Decameron is a frame narrative, like the Canterbury Tales, where a situation gives rise to the setting of the story. In Boccacio’s tale, ten people flee from Floerence to escape the ravages of the plague and tell stories to each other to pass the time. Once again, the reaction of flight is the setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, The Masque of the Red Death.
There were a host of social reactions as well. One of the most hateful was that of scapegoating. As already noted, there was no enemy with the plague. There was no person responsible for the death that each and every town in Europe felt. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, sins, daughters; all were affected by the death rampant between 1347 and 1351 ad. Human nature desires to blame someone or something for our misfortunes. We see this from the beginning of our sorry state, the Garden of Eden. As soon as God called Adam’s attention to his sin, Adam pointed to his scapegoat to avoid punishment himself. The medieval world was no different. They looked for any possible scapegoat to deliver them from their pain. Oftentimes the Jews were made the scapegoat of the anger flowing out of Europe. Pogroms, organized massacres of Jews, were frequent in towns and cities with Jewish populations. Many Christians still held Jews responsible for the death of Christ and the Jewish populations of Europe were often persecuted in various ways. At the time of the Black Death, they were made the scapegoat; beaten and killed as a way of venting anger or placing blame. Many Jews fled western Europe to eastern Europe and Russia at this time. This made for a large Jewish population in Russia, Poland, Prussia, and other developing countries there. An increase in witchcraft accusations and trials also seems to be due to the sense of helplessness many people felt in the face of the Black Death.
[1] From “On the Pestilence” anonymous English poem in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 126.
[2] From “Chronicon Henrici de Hervordia” The Black Death, 150.
[3] Robert E. Lerner, “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities, ” American Historical Review LXXXVI, 1981: 552.