The Black Death

To some at least of these questions this book may provide a tentative answer. But it is only necessary to pose them to see how far we are, and will always be from a definitive solution. In a field so amorphous any attempt at the precise or the categoric would be futile. But if one were to seek to establish one generalization, one cliché perhaps, to catch the mood of the Europeans in the second half of the fourteenth century, it would be that they were enduring a crisis of faith. Assumptions which had been taken for granted for centuries were now in question, the very framework of men’s reasoning seemed to be breaking up. And though the Black Death was far from being the only cause, the anguish and disruption which it had inflicted made the greatest single contribution to the disintegration of an age.

Faith disappeared, or was transformed; men became at once sceptical and intolerant. It is not at all the modern, serenely cold, and imperturbable scepticism; it is a violent movement of the whole nature which feels itself impelled to burn what it adores; but the man is uncertain in his doubt, and his burst of laughter stuns him; he has passed as it were, through an orgy, and when the white light of the morning comes he will have an attack of despair, profound anguish with tears and perhaps a vow of pilgrimage and a conspicuous conversion.^{532}

Jusserand’s classic description of the European in the second half of the fourteenth century captures admirably the twin elements of scepticism and timorous uncertainty. The generation that survived the plague could not believe but did not dare deny. It groped myopically towards the future, with one nervous eye always peering over its shoulder towards the past. Medieval man during the Black Death, had seemed as if silhouetted against a background of Wagnerian tempest. All around him loomed inchoate shapes redolent with menace. Thunder crashed, lightning blazed, hail cascaded; evil forces were at work, bent on his destruction. He was no Siegfried, no Brunnhilde heroically to defy the elements. Rather, it was as if he had wandered in from another play: an Edgar crying plaintively, ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold; poor Tom’s a-cold!’ and seeking what shelter he could against the elements.

Poor Tom survived, but he was never to be quite the same again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THERE are remarkably few full-length studies dealing with the Black Death as a whole or even in a country or group of countries. The most important of these is still that by Cardinal Gasquet though many of his facts have now been disproved and his conclusions shown to be invalid. Sticker’s study gives the widest coverage for Europe as a whole and Hoeniger’s for Germany. The others are of slight importance.

• Coulton. G. G. The Black Death, London, 1929.

• Gasqute, F. A. The Great Pestilence, London, 1893. Reprinted substantially unrevised as The Black Death, London, 1908

• Hecker. J. F. C. The epidemics of the Middle Ages, trad. Babington. London, 1859.

• Hoeniger, R. Der Schwarze Tod in Deuuschland, Berlin. 1882.

• Lechner, K. Das Grosse Sterben in Deutschland, Innsbruck, 1884

• Nohl. J. Der Schwarze Tod, Potsdam, 1924.

• Philippe, A. Histoire de la Peste Noire, Paris, 1853.

• Sticker, G. Die Pest, Vol. 1, (‘Die Geschichte der Pest’), Giessen, 1908.

More useful material on a national or international scale is often to be found in books not dealing exclusively with the Black Death (Coulton’s Mediaeval Panorama, for instance, contains more of value than his monograph mentioned above) or in more recent essays and articles. In this and subsequent sections I have marked with an asterisk sources of particularly valuable information.

• Carpentier, E.* ‘Autour de la Peste Noire’, Annales E.S.C., 1962, XVII, p. 1062.

• Coulton, G. G.* Mediaeval Panorama, Cambridge, 1938, Chap. 38.

• Doren, A. Storia Economica dell’ Italia nel Medio Evo, Padua, 1937.

• Duby, G. L’Économie rural et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval, Paris, 1962.

• Gwynn, A. ‘The Black Death in Ireland’, Studies, 1935, Vol. XXIV, p. 25.