Fall 2021 Distinguished Faculty Lecture: How Medieval Europe Recovered from the Black Death

Renaissance or Resilience : How Medieval Europe Recovered from the Black Death In the fourteenth century, the world faced the greatest public health crisis in its history: a pandemic disease, caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis, which killed approximately 4050 of the population of large parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. This pandemic, which later came to be known as the Black Death, resulted in profound individual and collective trauma. Yet the 50year period that followedone of the most vibrant in the history of the European continentprovides us with a remarkable case study in human resilience. The period after the plague saw a growing willingness to interrogate established truths and traditions. Ideas of freedom and liberty propelled a struggle for social justice that would inspire later revolutionaries, including Thomas Paine. Meanwhile, cultural life flourishedthis was the age of Boccaccios Decameron, and Chaucers Canterbury Tales. Medieval resilience also implied practical respons