The Black Death

Philip Ziegler ends his book with three wide-ranging chapters on the effects of the pestilence in the longer term, with particular reference to English instituions and the economy. But as everybody writing on the Black Death has found, disentangling its consequences from those of other contemporary factors has not been easy. Was it plague, episcopal benefactions, or new chantry-related employment opportunities, for example, which brought increasing numbers of students to Oxford and Cambridge in the Late Middle Ages, as William J. Courtenay noted in The effect of the Black Death on English higher education’, Speculum, 55 (1980), pp.696–714? What part did plague or fear of Purgatory play in the Corpus Christi gilds described by Miri Rubin in ’Corpus Christi fraternities and late-medieval piety’, Studies in Church History, 23 (1986), pp.97–109, and again in her Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in late medieval culture (Cambridge, 1991)? Was the horror of an unsecured death more responsible than plague itself for the developments in art discussed by Joseph Polzer, ‘Aspects of the fourteenth-century iconography of death and the plague’, in The Black Death, Ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), pp. 107–30, by John B. Friedman, ‘“He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence”: the iconography of the plague in the Late Middle Ages’, in Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages,ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, 1986), pp.75–112, by Louise Marshall, ‘Manipulating the sacred: image and plague in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47(1994), pp. 485–532, by Phillip Lindley in ‘The Black Death and English Art’ in The Black Death in England, eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and by myself in Chapter 9 (‘Architecture and the Arts’) of King Death (London, 1906)?

On mortality art and its associated rituals, Paul Binski’s Medieval Death (London, 1996) is especially useful But there is much relevant material also in Kathleen Cohen’s Metamorphosis of a death symbol The transi tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renassance (Berkeley, 1973), Philippa Tristram’s Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London, 1976), R. C. Finucane’s ‘Sacred corpse, profane carrion: social ideals and death rituals in the later Middle Ages’, in Mirrors of Mortality. Studies in the social history of death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London, 1981). J. M. Maddison’s ‘Master masons of the diocese of Lichfield: a study in 14th-century architecture at the time of the Black Death’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 85 (1988), pp. 107–72, Pamela King’s ‘The cadaver tomb in England: novel manifestations of an old idea’, Church Monuments, 5 (1990), pp. 26–38, Howard Colvin’s Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven and London, 1991), Nigel Llewellyn’s The Art of Death. Visual culture in the English death ritual c. 1500 – c. 1800 (London, 1991), Malcolm Norris’s ‘Later medieval monumental brasses: an urban funerary industry and its representation of death’, in Death in Towns, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 184–209 and 248–51, Richard Marks’s Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), Ann Eljenholm Nichols’s Seeable Signs. The iconography of the Seven Sacraments (Woodbridge, 1994), and Christopher Daniell’s Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London, 1997).