How The Black Death Affected Culture

The Black Death is considered to be "the most severe epidemic in human history" that decimated Europe from 1347 to 1351 (Witowski). Not only did the Black Death depopulate Europe, but it also had long lasting social and economic effects as well. The social effects consisting of culture, morals, values, and social norms. The economic effects consisting of labor, payment, and the foundation of feudalism. However one would call it, the Bubonic plague, the resulting Pneumonic plague or the Pestilence, the disease scarred the social and pecuniary foundations of specifically the European Middle Ages and some of the impacts even carrying forth into further generations. The depopulation that followed after the plague is said to be the most obvious

Batchelor noted that "many historians and commentators have written about the increase in morbidity following the plague" such as subjects like death and purgatory becoming more inspiring to writers and artists (291). Medieval art and literature show the increased interest in death and morbid subjects (Batchelor 291). For example, "the horror and suffering caused by the Black Death found another" way to be expressed through the "dance of death" engravings which were presented in "almost every large town and city (Hall 211). These engravings represented the new founded idea that all men are equal before God due to the surmounting realization in that time that all men were equal before death. Due to the incredible pain and suffering of life during these ages Wheeler explains that this is why "medieval literature had always been somewhat other worldly, focused on rejecting the physical world and embracing the spiritual world". Wheeler also says that the trend increased for the next thirty or fifty years where the idea of morality only emphasized the inevitable: death. Secular literature also increased in popularity where its forms of entertainment served "to distract the public from the anxieties of the plague"

Barthold Georg Niebuhr in 1816, wrote as follows, "The plague not only depopulates and kills, it gnaws the moral stamina and frequently destroys it entirely..." (qtd. in Nohl Preface). Barthold also states that "Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand" (qtd. in Nohl Preface). The times of the plague destroyed many social connections and made close relationships nonexistent. Wheeler states that "people abandoned their friends and family, fled cities, and shut themselves off from the world". The plague also made people terrified of any contact with strangers and foreigners. In Wheeler's categorization of psychological effects it was noted that "many people became more xenophobic and isolationist". The feelings of the people affected by the immense death and desolation led many people to wander homeless through the abandoned countryside and farm land, whereas others took advantage of the surplus of material goods and robbed and stole. Many people devastated by the effects of the Black Death, wandered homeless through the countryside, while others robbed and stole. People during the plague each felt differently about how to deal with the disease. Some took the disease as a more religious matter and "felt that the wrath of God was