The Black Plague And Its Influence On European Culture

The Black Plague or the Black Death was the name associated to the three-type disease that nearly wiped out an entire civilization. The roots of the Black plague have been traced back to a bacterium called Yersina pestis. named by a French biologist Alexandre Yersin. The disease travels from person to person through the lungs, through the air, or through the bite of infected fleas and rats. There were three different versions of the plague, which included the Bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and the septicemic plague. Each of these infected the host and weakened the entire body eventually leading to death.

The Plague was thought to have originated from various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda.

Many artistic representations exemplified moments of utter misery, sarcasm, and sometimes hope. The medieval artist strove for realism. Churches and monasteries were covered in inscriptions, paintings, and sculpture that portrayed biblical scenes or saints. In many of these early paintings and sculptures, death was represented as a passage between life on earth and the illumination. After the Black Death, death was feared and sometimes considered God’s punishment for sin. Marked by crowded, paranoid compositions, ugly, menacing faces, bright colors and increased violence, Black Death art is unbalanced and uneasy.

The Black Death left a period of sadness and despair behind it, which carried on into many cultural and artistic forms. Many scholars believe that the nursery rhyme “ring around the rosy” was written about the symptoms of the Black Death.

After the events of the plague Europes economy began to shift and change it’s manner of living. Those who had survived the plague had increased belief in god but had become skeptical of their previous teachings from the church. They believed this pestilence was brought about because of the people’s many sins, forcing men and women to recognize the fragility of life and to scrutinize it more closely. Shortage of labor had shifted the balance of power between the lords and their tenants. Authority and tradition were no longer accepted without