Discussion VI: The Black Death Pandemic and the Early Modern World

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Hi Everybody,

Welcome to the Gothic and Late Medieval Worlds

As you will see when you start doing the readings about this period, after a period of optimism in the Gothic Era, we arrive into circumstances that are all too familiar to us right now in 2022 – a global pandemic of various forms of Yersinia Pestis, more commonly known and feared as the Plague, which, in the 14th century came to Europe after sweeping through Asia, India, and the Middle East and killed nearly 40% of European society in about 5 years in what came to be called The Black Death.

One of the contemporaneous accounts of the onset of the Black Death in Europe was The Decameron, written by the Florentine author and early Renaissance Humanist Giovanni Boccaccio between 1349-1352 during the height of the Plague, who chronicled not only the facts of the horror of the onset of the Plague but also the fictional adventures of seven men and three women who fled Florence to “socially distance” with each other at a “deserted” country villa to try to escape the pestilence. I’ve placed a link to the Introduction to his work, which describes the onset of plague in Florence here: Decameron.docxDownload Decameron.docx

For a perspective on an organized, centralized government’s policies and attitudes towards plagues within their society in the Early Modern era, I’ve also provided you a link to an article on how the Mexica treated outbreaks of plague-like diseases in their society, prior to the invasion of Cortes and the Spanish, and the smallpox they brought with them – please read the article linked here: Aztec Kings Rules for Plagues.docxDownload Aztec Kings Rules for Plagues.docx

To start your discussion for this unit, please read the Introduction to The Decameron as well as Aztec Kings’ Rules for Plagues and then analyze and compare the reactions to the plague in Florence to your experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic – if you were to write such an Introduction to the “COVID-19 Decameron”, for future generations, what would you tell them about your personal experience, how you can, or can’t, relate to the experiences of the Florentines’ that Boccaccio describes, and how would our experience in LA, California, and the US compare to Florence in the Black Death and to Mexica policies in the pre-Colombian era? 

Then, please assess how or whether the Black Death impacted Western/Christian cultures and societies for those that survived, considering religion/faith, intellectual developments/philosophies, and social relations in its aftermath and then speculate what might result in our society in the future as a result of this pandemic.