- Approaching this week, many of the preconceptions I had about the plague were addressed. As anticipated, images bought to mind when thinking of the plague involved plague doctors with long masks, rats, and sores.
Of the information presented, I was particularly interested in the reasons Medieval people thought the plague had come about, and the religious overtones of this. The primary sources made for interesting reading, in particular the document entitled “The Flagellants” in Horrox’s The Black Plague. It was interesting to note the dissonance between the calls for pious acts of penance in previous letters, and the the disdain for these flagellants. The reasoning for this, of usurping the order of teachers in the Church, implies that acts of penance were only acceptable when performed under the supervision of the Church, in ways deemed acceptable.
Another point of interest was the seeming parallels between today’s Covid-19 pandemic, and the plague. References made to “the disease from the East” struck a chord, as did discussion of the ways in which the disease would have spread through ports. Today’s equivalent is the manner in which international travel exacerbated the spread of Covid, contributing to the vastly differing rates of infection in those countries which closed their borders, and those which did not. Further to this, the belief that plague was spread by miasmas, or bad smells, brings to mind modern fears about the spread of germs through air. It is easy to imagine the inhabitants of Medieval Europe avoiding these miasmas much as we today avoid crowds or unventilated spaces. A further similarity which stood out was the act of singing as an act of devotion. I could not help but remember scenes of neighbourhoods singing from their balconies during the very first lockdowns.