Cultural and Religious Impact of the Black Death
The Black Death of 1347–1351 did not only empty villages and unsettle manors; it rewrote the way medieval Europeans prayed, mourned, and pictured the world. Within months of the first deaths at Messina in October 1347, the religious life of the continent was visibly transformed: processions clogged the streets of Cologne and Tournai, new brotherhoods of the dead were chartered from Florence to Lübeck, and painters began to crowd skeletons into the margins of psalters and chancel walls. The three articles gathered in this section trace the most durable of those responses — the new public penance that put the body on the road, the new iconography that put death on the wall, and the strange anachronism of the beaked plague doctor that has come to stand for the catastrophe in the modern imagination.
Penitents on the road
The most visible religious innovation of the plague years was the great wave of public penance that swept from Hungary into the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and the cities of the Meuse and the Moselle between 1348 and 1350. Bands of laymen, sometimes several hundred strong, marched from town to town in double ranks, scourging their bare backs three times before each of fourteen stations while singing the Attende caelum and begging the onlookers to repent. The movement alarmed bishops and kings; Pope Clement VI issued Inter sollicitudines against the German flagellants on 20 October 1349. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., in The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death (1992) and in his longer essays on Florentine and Tuscan responses, has argued — against an older Catholic-apologetic tradition — that the flagellants were neither heretical nor a marginal phenomenon but a movement deeply rooted in communal lay piety and merchant associational life. The detailed history of these processions, their geography, and their suppression is the subject of The flagellant movement and the Black Death.
Death on the wall
The trauma of mass burial produced an equally visible shift in the visual arts. The iconography of the memento mori — the grinning skull, the worm-eaten cadaver, the personified Death leading pope and ploughman alike in chains — became one of the defining motifs of the late Trecento and the International Gothic. The Danse Macabre appeared in painted cycles at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris (c. 1424), at the Dominican priory in Basel, and at the Bern Münster; the transi tomb, in which the deceased is shown not in the robes of office but as a naked, half-decayed corpse, became a fashion from Burgundy to the Danube. Philippe Ariès, in L’homme devant la mort (1977) and The Hour of Our Death (1981), traced to this period the emergence of what he called the “tamed death” of Western Christendom: an awareness of mortality that was at once intimate, individual, and disciplining. The art-historical story of how the plague shaped painting, sculpture, and funerary monuments is told in How the Black Death influenced medieval art.
The figure of the plague doctor
The third article in this section takes up an image that, in the popular mind, has come to be inseparable from the medieval plague even though it postdates the Black Death by almost three centuries. The beaked mask stuffed with aromatic sponges, the long waxed coat, the leather gloves, and the conjuring wand are associated with Charles de Lorme, the physician who in 1619 designed a protective uniform for the doctors attending Gaston, Duke of Orléans, during an outbreak in Paris. The costume drew on contemporary miasma theory, on the work of Niccolò Massa and later Jean-Jacques Manget, and on a longer tradition of protective dress that ran back to plague tracts of the 1370s. The history of that figure — and the gap between its seventeenth-century origin and its medieval projection — is examined in The plague doctor: origins, costume, and meaning.
Articles in this section
- The flagellant movement and the Black Death
- How the Black Death influenced medieval art
- The plague doctor: origins, costume, and meaning