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Kanad Prajna Das

Medieval Literature

120351101

English 708

30 March 2022

The Black Death and fourteenth-century literature

“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike

through the breath and sight.” (qtd. in Jost 193)

No other pandemic in the history of the human civilization had such an impact on its

existence as that of the Black Death, a great cycle of epidemics. According to Castiglioni this

pestilence began in the interior of Asia about 1333. Then it spread through Italy and in 1348,

Florence alone lost more than 100,000 people and in 1720 the Plague broke out in Marseilles

and killed from 40,000 to 60,000 persons. Tobey writes: "The Black Death was bubonic

plague and it was about three times as severe in actual mortality as was the frightful influenza

epidemic of the World War period. The influenza of 1918 is estimated to have caused

20,000,000 deaths whereas the Black Death from 1348 to 1720 removed more than

50,000,000 people” (13-14). There was a statistical investigation done by Pope Clement VI,

which claimed the number of deaths in the whole world to be approximately 42,836,486.

As the Black Death slowly started to create a feeling of hopelessness in the masses,

the European religious culture turned towards a more pious approach, like in Book XII of The

Revelations of Divine Love (1393), Julian of Norwich emphasised on Christ’s passion.

Whereas Henry of Lancaster emphasized on the concept that Black Death was a punishment

from God for their sins in the Anglo-Norman Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines. The legend of
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The Wandering Jew became popular during this time as the Jewish communities were

persecuted and butchered in a huge number due to the false belief inspired by the plagues of

Egypt from the book of Exodus.

Aron Ja. Gurevich “In the preface to his novelle Franco Sacchetti writes openly that

“people wanted to hear stories that brought them ease and consolation amid so many

disasters, the plague, and death” (247). Such sentiments were expressed in the works poets

and novelists like Petrarch (1304–1370) in his Sonnet 134, translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt,

where he talked about how the plague years affected his mental health. Another Italian poet,

Agnolo di Tura, in his Crunica Senese, gives a vivid picture of the aftermath of the plague in

Siena. Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron (ca. 1350–1351), provided one of the most

detailed descriptions of the plague and how it physically and mentally affected the Florentine

society and endangered its survival within the walls. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing

effects of the plague through descriptions of how infected people were deserted and weren’t

allowed to enter the town and also depicts how the plague was celestial punishment against

human vices and provided ways to attain mental peace in a communal isolation. The way

Boccaccio constructed 100 stories with Plague as its context later on seen in Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi and

Edgar Aleen Poe’s “The Masque of The Red Death”. Geoffrey Chaucer, who had the

equivalent socio-literary background as Boccaccio, composed The Canterbury Tales to

present England in a period that was in the danger of the plague. The work is often

interpreted as stories of chosen people and their pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket,

who were spared from the inevitable curse of the plague by God’s grace. In The Book of The

Duchess Chaucer mourns for the loss of the Blanche of Lancaster to console everyone who

lost their loved ones in the plague and the “Pardoner’s Tale” uses the Black Death as its

background and shows how the plague destroys the tree rioters because of their greed and
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spares honest men like the boy and the taverner. Years later Ingmar Bergman also depicted

Black Death in his film “The Seventh Seal” (1957). Robert R. Edwards claimed, “The present

consensus is that the Decameron returned [from Europe] with Chaucer as a literary model, as

an idea for a framed collection of stories grounded in an experience of the contemporary

world.” (Jost 206)

‘The Dance of Death’ or ‘Dance Macabre’ was one of the most frequently used

themes in medieval art and literature during the Black Death, which depicted all kinds people

from the society arranged according to rank order and ages dancing with a skeleton leading

them one by one to the grave. Famous works that incorporated this theme were the Dance of

Macabre by the English poet John Lydgate, Petrarch’s “Triumph of Death,” and in William

Langland’s Piers Plowman, the great 14th century satire that revolted against feudalism and

foreshadowed the Peasants Revolt of England in 1381, “we find the plague to be the tireless

dancer who conquers all” (Cook 8).

Expression of the traumatic experiences of the plague was also seen in the medieval

mystery and morality plays which was the subject of many religious Corpus Christi plays,

such as 15th century play of unknown authorship The Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac and

York Play of the Crucifixion embraced blood and gore in a sacred context. Due to a

widespread revival of black magic in the mainstream culture, Saws and aphorisms became

part of the Middle Age Literature.

Although during The Black Death fine art and paintings barely flourished but after the

plague almost every other artwork portrayed the inevitability of death and as Millard Meiss

specifically points out was “pervaded by profound pessimism” (qtd. in DesOrmeaux 21). This

type of plague art included Triumph of Death, Last Judgement, Inferno, The Black Death,
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Chronicle and The Three Quick and The Three Dead etc. Interestingly the theme of plague as

a divine punishment reoccurs in almost every one of them.

The influence of Black Death over theological writings, different genres of literature

and fine art slowly spread across continents, as the plague dominated public emotions.

Contemporary literary works engaged with its audience at an emotional level, and artifacts,

on the other hand created in a prolific amount, replicated and circulated by various artists,

and recognized by the literate and non-literate masses alike, from centuries after centuries.

This phenomenon which was a stepping stone into the future of humanity, changed the entire

course of civilization in the fourteenth-century by shifting towards a new socioeconomic

culture and inspiring a new form of religious expression, literary style, artistic depiction that

created a foreground before the arrival of the Renaissance.

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Works Cited

Jost, Jean E. “The Effects of the Black Death: The Plague in Fourteenth-Century

Religion, Literature, and Art.” Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times,

2016, pp. 193–238, doi:10.1515/9783110436976-007. Accessed 29 Mar. 22

Tobey, James A. Riders of the Plagues; The Story of the Conquest of Disease. C.

Scribner's Sons, 1930.

Gurevich, Aron Ja. “The Merchant.” The Medieval World, edited by Jacques Le Goff,

translated by Lydia G Cochrane, Collins & Brown, London, 1990, pp. 243–285.

Cook, Raymond A. “The Influence of the Black Death on Medieval Literature and

Language.” Kentucky Foreign Romance Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1, 1964, pp. 5–13.,

doi:10.1080/00230332.1964.9927665,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00230332.1964.9927665 . Accessed 29 Mar. 22

DesOrmeaux, Anna L. “The Black Death and Its Effect on Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-

Century Art.” Louisiana State University, Louisiana State University, 2007, pp. 1–99.

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/1641 . Accessed 29 Mar. 22

Drillinger, Meagan. “Depression Symptoms 3 Times Higher during COVID-19

Lockdown.” Healthline, Healthline Media, 10 Sept. 2020, www.healthline.com/health-

news/depression-symptoms-3-times-higher-during-covid-19-lockdown. Accessed 29

Mar. 22