The Black Death (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for Don learning the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk in october 30 and 47 a genuine trading ship arrived at the visit board and Messina in Sicily readying to docket would have nosed in among many similar ships doing similar things but this ship was special it carried the plague the black death caused unknown for about 600 years but in the next four years it killed up to half of Europe's population it's terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writers 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 his economics and rearranged its society but did the disease also bring subtle transformations in its art its religion and its intellectual art look with me to discuss the black death Amir Ruben professor of medieval and early modern history Queen Mary University of London Paul Minsky professor of the history of medieval art at the University of Cambridge and Samuel Kern professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow Mary woman can you talk us through the symptoms that people would have started to play to display in Massena 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 bacterium in its 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 war more more 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 in body and injects the bacterium into that opening of that wound that's thus been created and what I just would we just must make it absolutely clear to the listeners from the answer that what you have said is accurate but that was not known until the 20th century absolutely they didn't know that there so they had no idea about rats fleas anything like whatsoever and none is a guiding factor for what we're going to talk about didn't know about rats they didn't know how it works at all now 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 you know depending where the bite took place if it's in the leg probably it would travel through the lymphatic tract through the body's own systems of communication as it were to the closest to the closest gland to 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 and there a nasty sort of inflammation will develop into what people recognize in the period as the booboo 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 a company by appalling pain and the expectation is but it's described as causing death within about two days it spread rapidly through Europe from let say from assyrian sicily up north and west and can you tell us how how how how it spread through Europe so rapidly the fundamental thing to remember is that Europe is a highly communicating and well 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 there's such a thriving fishing industry and indeed the ship that comes to Dorset is one that's arrived probably from Gascony so there is this tremendous connectedness people are travelling by River along the coasts by roads there are pilgrims there are traders little Wars going on there Wars going on absolutely and people are moving absolutely and of course the sailors on the boats are absolutely crucial battles me about the sailors you've got this you got the rats on the ship you got the fleas on the right 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 they do ghosts there is a standstill and it's not it's sort of 80% mortality on the whole is what sort of most most people dealing with the demography of this epidemic with it 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 : acidity where as a disease spread did doctors at the time we know it happened now with the management of 600 years hindsight but did doctors of the time have any medical explanations in their terms for what was going on oh 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 there was things like earthquakes that change the atmosphere so then that created mutations in the air they were very much based in a Hippocratic galenic 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 contagion the whole sense of this being a contagious disease that they had never witnessed before and in fact when you read the plague tracts which which explode in this period it's really a new genre of writing about medicine that becomes some have argued the verse the form of popular literature the West these tracks are very much distinguishing this new disease by contagion as much as by the buboes that modern historian have seized on and almost isolated out of this picture that contemporaries had but there were what we would not think of as fantastical explanations to the 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 yeah and so on it was those a kind of looking back and looking at it from what I've read from what you've written another thing there's kind of agony of ignorance really it wasn't done well this this comes from the chroniclers and that's true the one thing that I think is very interesting in 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 chronicler is even more critical of the doctors saying Matteo Villani 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 because doctors won't press for doctors but that changes remarkably let's 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 whether this is right people extreme licentiousness because why not breaking the law because nobody's going to catch you and so on is that it's not what's going on oh yes one you can see that criminality for instance or increases that particularly acts of theft or on the rise the chronicler is all get onto this about that john of reading about these new new forms of fashion for instance one that where women wear to bear their asses and but this is part probably all of this great reflex of the population to to make make good their losses to reproduce and in fact there are there's what followers playing not only in 1348 but through the early modern history is this rebound of the population trying to regain their losses by a 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 now hit the country as well as the city the old as well as the young the strong as well as the weak rich as well as the far nobody nobody nobody really knew what was going on there just before i move on to wanting just to get the scale of it across i mean one that you keep talking about the chroniclers one of the chronicler says that most of bristol was wiped out and he gives figures but that out of a seventy thousand population in london thirty thousand at least were wiped out and this is going on in a two or three year span going on in villages because our little village tallies and so on in at one tiny village i can remember four hundred ninety people to kind of been all that tiny minute four hundred and ninety people killed and so so this is the scale of it all been to keep the the you you're going to talk a bit about about other sorts of consequences how it affected other areas of life and it's useful to to see the arts because that's a well recorded area so we can we can look at that how man let's move quickly how badly did it hit italian artistic intellectual communities let's take florence luciano for instance at this time well you must remember that there has been a splendid evanka an Italian painting for the last half century or so from 1280 onwards so hmm there there is undoubtedly an impact in the short run and also your Anna period around the middle of the 14th century when the avant-garde has stalled and central to the debate about the Black Death is what what extent is the Black Death actually implicated and that kind of change in an immediate short-term what happens is that patrons and artists are radically affected by this I mean the the in the Italian cities the urban commissioning elites are disorganized reordered there's the rise as it were of a new a new patrician class a nouveau riche class who have new wealth of course because there is redistribution of wealth there's a quite clearly an end of large-scale commissioning so that the very grand cinematic fresco and panel painting cycles of the first part of the 14th century in Italy which should 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 so that the black death is undoubtedly a significant contributor e factor artists are killed but do we find and we find visual evidence of the effect of the other back that do we see it in the paintings in the sculptures in tomb decorations that so could you give us some install it depends it depends where you are if you're if you're in England and you look particularly the evidence of building Italy as a pictorial culture at this time overwhelmingly the evidences pictorial in England the the 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 in the West front where the sculptures break off at a certain point in in the nave at Tewkesbury 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 that pretty clearly the master Mason that the staff left there was a decline in the quality of work Litchfield other other other major buildings that there is an impact in Italy that there's a more interesting problem which is that not only as it were the style this album guard style seems to be changing but there is a change in the according to some authorities like melodies that the great authority on the Black Death after the Second World War Mees argue that there is a new transcendentalism a change in the substantive change in the content and religiosity of average you know away with the humane avant-garde valleys let's get back to something more austere more more reactionary and and I'll the basis of that proposition that has been much debate me Rubin all people were not medically equipped to take this on although they they did variously but they were they felt they were theologically equipped can you tell us the reaction and which would you do because I also very brief I'd like that so often you can you go into what they thought I mean I don't have what wasn't your master what did I think what's happening what did they done wrong on what was God doing wrong or what was going on God doesn't do wrong 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 see that people have to go to church more regularly or can you home in on particular groups and that those are the two possibilities in it before we hum in on the groups I want to get the theological reaction I mean a lot of people think is the apocalypse going on well definitely those 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 deserve it is about the not knowing of God's ways but there's a sure way there's a sure way of trying to protect yourself as 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 to appease God and the rise particularly massively in Germany of these great packets of flagellants who treads around barefooted hitting themselves with spiked balls drawing enormous crowds like a football crowd watching them sort of bleeding and trying that in their own bodies to sort of to appease this ferocious it's two things it's finishing 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 collaboration 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 current which as many mentioned but I'd like to turn to you on this different groups were were to blame somebody had to be to blame and they started they were either floods and thought we are all to blame and so we will stand in for you all or but there were groups aimed oh can you just go through those groups well in some places they were the poor and beggars in some places even the clergy or in Sicily it wasn't the Jews but the Catalans who were massacred not in as great numbers as what happened in the Rhineland and parts of present-day Switzerland and and Spain and parts of France the Jews were the the most essential but of this are what is called hysteria and they were accused of poisoning the world and poisoning the rivers and and it's it's absolutely I mean it's because of that saying it's appalling internment 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 that in fact excommunicated those who were initiating these pogroms perhaps the most important one in fact was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fourth of Bohemia the so people did think this the the the the Pope pointed to England and said look our people are dying there and then 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 at 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 this attract by a Jewish writer in Spain Isaac van Tadros 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 but seems like it is split because it wasn't bottom up was it was the you have mentioned goes to Holy Roman Emperor who went against the Pope and he pardoned people who attack 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 cast Ilan's you find counts you find the co-operative of Austria the ones initiating these pogroms are in fact at the height of society they don't go any further down than in oguri well we would like to I further but we've got a bit more on the ground to travel across yes okay poor poor Pinsky how did this truck a lot of people think oh we can see this transferring straight into art with the don't Danse Macabre for instance now from really Hewitt namaz that'd be that depictions of that had begun little before Lister but it then intensified now can you tell us the place of the Danse 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 what you're you're quite right the dance of death the dance macabre is is one and overwhelmingly 15th and late 14th century thing it's quite substantially predates the plague people precisely what the original dance macabre Awards that we're all up to speed but 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 embarrass you by plucking you out into the dance and you have to skip around you wall paintings were of the subject were quite common in cemeteries or cloisters and so it was wave that was aware of as it were showing what what at what a democratic force a death actually is and and it's an overwhelmingly 15th century theme there are there are others I mean there there's the emergence in the late 14th and 15th century of Kodava tunes which which transy tombs as they're sometimes call which are which are monuments and churches which shows sculptures of the deceased as a corpse in various stages of sometimes grotesque decomposition with worms and snakes pouring out of them and the kind of thing again that kind of thing tends to be Northern European and it tends to be elite I got one or two things to qualify that later on but the third thing is I think all the three living on the three dead which is 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 and they bump into three skeleton yes ed but they're mirrors mmm the doc they're doppelgangers and and and it's it's a form of mirror-like doubling or self self-reproach penitential imagery and you mentioned flatulence earlier on linking all these things but the creation that comes with that is terrific it's in Latin but translation is the skeleton say to the to the three young men what you are we were what we are you will be as as you as you see me so shall he be isn't there's on 18th of the Pyrrhic 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 Mundo thing these are not creations of the of the Black Death I mean the Black Death you know in terms of macabre representation there are pictures in tournay 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 the thing of Parros which strike mercilessly since Sebastian who is quite struck by arrows as one of the plague help us sense 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 it's central moments of our of a crucifixion of a death and so on but the danse macabre is very much along with those other topics these are times that are much more common from enough in northern Europe than in southern Europe but I don't wanna be too categorical Obama and they tend to be slightly more popular amongst elites in northern Europe than in southern Europe but so we have to be we have to be a little bit careful not generalizing Mary can I come to you about can you take on from what Paul was saying the changes in the attitudes of death and the rituals associated with it you're going in that direction yes no it's really interesting because I mean obviously a bishop can set up a cadaver tomb for himself were a priest we'll 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 on the athlete during the Black Death and immediately afterwards so many of their colleagues have died so many of their neighbors 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 phone so this is new interesting thinking you'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 in Bishop's 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 and thinking of new ways of engaging between the living and the dead yes on this point on memory or burial customs changed dramatically not immediately after the Black Death but after the second coming of the Black Death in the 13 60s and 70s and one can see this in Italy and 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 it no meais the 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 permissions for tin Lehrer off to pieces and column paintings and most often depictions of the dead painted in their very likeness to be remembered pull movements it's very interesting how the English evidence I think chimes chimes in with them because the earliest English vernacular epitaph dates to the 13 70s and it commemorates as outside Oxford will get commemorates a man called John the Smith John Smith we know from estate records is a peasant who struck lucky because what he was able to do was to consolidate the estates of other people around if 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 let your ever up in heaven everything that's here it belongs to other men other men's it says and interesting things he's almost certainly killed off in one of the outbreaks of the 1360s or more likely 13 70s and it had attached to it a cadaver the origins of cadaver imagery in the immediate wake of the Black Death ar-ar-ar as it were maybe bottom what not not top done can I ask you specific question meeting Mary Lee the though English mysticism in the second Health fortune said she was extremely intense you would and you an in Norwich you've got the part of unknowing 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 was 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 profits in mystics in an anchorite you know not exactly the big monastic institutions a lot of them 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 this massive attack on the population some ago and had to be addressed and yeah let's begin to look at that the english coming in 1314 i passed the ordinance of labourers now they were on the sea truck what you tell us what they're trying to contain it directly romantic 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 that certain places where it doesn't happen for instance then no regional laws for the Netherlands says 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 our wages stable they're going back to 1346 which was a terrible depression and up to then preserve wages at that level would really have been starvation was this because the Russians the peasants given that fewer of them and Labor's more in a man would ask for too much and become that sort of it yes there they are 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 into the thirteen 70s or even the thirteen 80s the big winners in this period all the ones who are being victimized by the chroniclers and people like William of of William Langland who say who sets all these greedy peasants you know who are you know who what of the fine French bacon on that place and won't settle for the old fare are just victimizing the nobility but what George homes found in 1958 is that in fact those who profit the most until about 1381 were in fact a big nobility in England because they're collecting more land and they were collecting more land they were turning back the clock on servile duties and also through some effectiveness of these ordinances of just of these ordinances the statutes of labourers they were able to keep wages very low in real terms so to continue that Mary I know you want to say somebody can you answer this question as well what you look we look at say the mid 13 50s what if you'd come back if you left in 46 and come back in 56 13:48 comfort what massive changes would you say what changes first of all the villages would have just some villages would have had hardly anyone but old people in them old people on a few enterprising people what's I mean family collapse is 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 that so so let's say in the first few years total disruption food isn't there food being collected harvest new citizen beam 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 intend 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 what in this post plague period that there's a movement towards as Mary mentioned in in the Cambridge example the finding of institutions hospitals chantry's university colleges can you talk about that a little if sure absolutely in in the province of Canterbury for example that's basically southern England you do get new art genre they kind of grow out of this one is a thing called the Stone cage Chantry which is a small space which surrounds an altar in a tomb and it's a new genre it's an Episcopal thing the bishops of Winchester liked them very much and so with that fall um a Chantry is 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 particular for the soul of the father so the premise of course on the doctrine of purgatory this is this advanced fire insurance idea that you can get out of 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 our colleges our collegiate institutions in in say Oxford and Cambridge are essentially academic challenger is I mean they're founded around the idea of prayer from forever for his mind I went over the great schools of the late Middle Ages they founded around the idea of 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 MIT to undertake the foundations as 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 articles doctrines I mean doctrines about the relationship of the living murdered Samuel can you maintain dinner on earth are you say that in the following decades after the thirty fifties let's say towards the end of the fourteenth century you don't mind me being a little general at this time of the program 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 are in 1348 fifty-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 are one the mortality rates particularly up until 1400 and in most places afterwards our decline radically he said because the plague is reduced in intensity why did they decline so much it's very interesting the plague comes back you think well why wasn't it as bad as before other fewer rats so though 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 your seniors pestis and which humans have a natural immunity and you see this in the statistics you see a people barely looked at immunity two things happen one this radical decline in mortality secondly from what least what the chroniclers tell us also a decline in morbidity and thirdly which is I think very essential is 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 plate where we can measure it in places like Pisa and Siena 88 percent of the victims and children like other diseases that become domesticated this becomes very heavily a childhood disease with these of big hits of the population over our 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 have these you go from utter despondency to utter arrogance and the course of about 30 years with doctors such as the Pope's doctor in the 13 70s and 80s of who who proclaims that Hippocrates and Galen 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 sane of a hundred patients in my practice I cured them all ah because of what I'm doing Mary 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 of life very close to alchemy to try and find one I mean in a way like I like some sort of a lot of 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 labor is so expensive why have all these peasants working on parable let's turn our land into posture let's diversify our economy so landlords say hey I could have warrants for rabbits there Rapid City just get on with it you don't need to tend to them very much or if I have maybe maybe salt pans maybe a bit of fishing on my River really interesting thinking sifting from the one cash crop arable way of thinking to diversifying in the spreading the risk it's a really interesting period in that sense did this in did this leave this this plagued 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 emphasis perhaps a brief as we've all said with penitential emphasis 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 what 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 and pilgrimage in the parrot and you can tell the increase in pilgrim an increase in pilgrimage which yes I mean as it what 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 43050 so it's been it's been charted by Ben Nelson that's one thing to say the other thing to say I think is that the the sort of mid 20th century hypothesis about this which mellowed me is put forward is that there isn't a submerging of Christian belief but there's a there is a change in emphasis in other words that you instead of this loving God of the new 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 ematic atavistic punitive start style of religions so the style of faith undoubtedly changes but but I don't think I don't think this as it were a radical subverting of its content so I'm going after the Black Death II there were a great number of increasing number of rebellions of what it being peasants as they were then call it let's say the what Tyler 1381 you um but he wasn't the only one there quite a few wedding can you just can you give us some account 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 ah the one thing that is remarkable of just how few or peasant or artisan movements there are from about 1348 to 1355 1355 initiates a new movement among artisans and peasants - 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 of of entering governments and there is this wonderful wave all popular rebellion in popular movements not just the big three or four that historians tend to emphasize the Shikari the revolt of the Chompy and florence and the peasant 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 13 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 can you do you think that the black that can be sent to be a bridging time in european culture that there was a real it set off brought together accelerated a serious and then along the 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 the religious community the the the fact that people all knew about this experience and could relate to each other so we're traveling 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 government did not allow them to prosper to benefit from the aftermath of the Black Death well 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 were Michael causal importance it's a reinforcing contributory factor would you agree with that briefly oh 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 wills and Testaments little changes in 1348 but when the plague hits again it's this these days continuation of plagues I think it does uh sure end a new mentality and a new popular spirit well thank you very much me Ruben Paul Minsky and Samuel Kern next week I'll be talking about probability thanks for listening we hope you've enjoyed this radio 4 podcast you can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy a BBC code at UK forward slash radio for

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Keywords: plague, history, black death, documentary, the black death, documentaries, full documentary, black plague, tv shows - topic, bubonic, bacteria, africa, europe, education, full length documentaries, health, 2017 documentary, bbc documentary, channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, medieval, bubonic plague, the plague, black death history, rats, black, medieval europe, black death and europe, alternate history hub, ben shapiro, madagascar

Id: kR5ZYGwSEUA

Length: 42min 19sec (2539 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018