Speaker 1: My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back with our second part in this series we've
Speaker 1: been doing about the Black Death, which is another name
Speaker 1: for the big outbreak at the beginning of the second
Speaker 1: plague pandemic. There have been three major pandemics in world
Speaker 1: history of of plague caused by the bacterium your Cineya
Speaker 1: pestis the second one of them is this big one
Speaker 1: at the in the Late Middle Ages that began in
Speaker 1: the middle of the fourteenth century and then had these
Speaker 1: recurrent waves that went on for hundreds of years after that.
Speaker 1: And so in the last episode we we talked about
Speaker 1: I guess mostly there we talked about scientific questions about
Speaker 1: what the causative agent of the plague was, how it spread,
Speaker 1: and some of the outstanding quests about that. There's still
Speaker 1: a lot actually that is surprisingly unknown about how exactly
Speaker 1: these plague pandemics worked, or certainly the older ones before
Speaker 1: the one in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: in this episode we're going to look more at the
Speaker 1: contemporary response to the Black Death, the fourteenth century response
Speaker 1: to the Black Death, Well, what we know about, uh,
Speaker 1: the views on disease and illness at the time, and
Speaker 1: to what extent those were useful or useless against this
Speaker 1: this onslaught of plague. Now, Rob, I know one of
Speaker 1: the main reasons that you got interested in doing a
Speaker 1: series of episodes on the plague was that you were
Speaker 1: interested in religious responses to the plague, like what were
Speaker 1: the religions in the affected communities saying about the plague?
Speaker 1: And so that's what we've been looking into for this episode,
Speaker 1: and we'll probably end up doing another one after this. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this has been a really interesting subject, not only
Speaker 1: because it is inherently interesting, but actually the historiography of
Speaker 1: the subject is interesting. Like there's been interesting recent scholarship
Speaker 1: on the historical analysis of the different religious responses to
Speaker 1: the Black Plague and and how those analyzes have worked
Speaker 1: and to what extent they're accurate. So, uh So the
Speaker 1: full disclosure, I think when we do start talking about
Speaker 1: comparative religious responses to the Black Plague, this is something
Speaker 1: that I think is probably still a matter of debate.
Speaker 1: This is also, like we were talking about in the
Speaker 1: last episode, not something that's just a settled set of
Speaker 1: facts that are a matter of the history books. Right.
Speaker 1: And then also when we get into stuff like this,
Speaker 1: a lot of times there are some broad theories about how, okay,
Speaker 1: if you didn't have the Black Death, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: had this, or because of the Black Death, this and
Speaker 1: this occurred, and some of these are very compelling cases.
Speaker 1: But we also have to remind ourselves that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a complex game of trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how history comes together, and you know, what causes what?
Speaker 1: So you know, but butterfly wings are flapping all over
Speaker 1: the place. Uh So you know, we have to have
Speaker 1: to remind ourselves that nothing is one certain. But some
Speaker 1: of these arguments are rather interesting. Well, let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and start here in uh In, in the world of
Speaker 1: Christian Europe at the time, and uh I thought we
Speaker 1: might begin by just looking at the broader view of
Speaker 1: illness and ultimately the divine um. Basically, how did people
Speaker 1: at this time in this region view the cause of disease,
Speaker 1: What did they think about disease, where do they think
Speaker 1: it came from? And how did they think you should
Speaker 1: attempt to treat it? And so I thought we might
Speaker 1: run through some of the key ideas here, and some
Speaker 1: of these we've discussed on the show before, sometimes at length.
Speaker 1: So for starters, there was the idea of the four humors,
Speaker 1: and this was rooted in the work of Hippocrates, that
Speaker 1: an imbalance of the four humors of blood, flim, black bile,
Speaker 1: and yellow bile could result in disease. And this idea
Speaker 1: had been built on by Galen and others. So it
Speaker 1: basically said, you know, to treat illness, one would need
Speaker 1: to rebalance the humors, and there were various ways of
Speaker 1: doing this. But we know now that this was not correct,
Speaker 1: and this is in fact one of the um the
Speaker 1: main lines of thinking leading to a major treatment of
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages and and beyond, which is the treatment
Speaker 1: of blood letting, or actually not just blood letting, blood letting,
Speaker 1: various purging procedures that would try to purge people of
Speaker 1: excess fluids within the body when some when it was
Speaker 1: thought that their humors were out of balance. So if
Speaker 1: you you know, you had too much blood in the
Speaker 1: body and maybe that's leading to uh, I don't recall exactly,
Speaker 1: maybe a fever or something like that. I could have
Speaker 1: that wrong. What they thought led to what but you
Speaker 1: could you could alleviate that by putting, you know, punching
Speaker 1: a hole in the body and allowing excess blood to
Speaker 1: run out, right now, Next, there was the there was
Speaker 1: the idea that illness spread via bad air, and this
Speaker 1: was me asthma theory, which we've definitely discussed on the
Speaker 1: show before. Uh. This also had been advanced by Hippocrates.
Speaker 1: So again an idea rooted in in in classical thought
Speaker 1: and some of the you know what, we're considered the
Speaker 1: best ideas concerning the natural world of the time. Um. So,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed on the show before, the notion of
Speaker 1: bad and foul air being the thing that allows disease
Speaker 1: to travel and infect. That would mean therefore the removal
Speaker 1: of bad air, or the positioning of yourself further from
Speaker 1: bad air, would be a way to prevent or combat illness. Now,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, this approach can work accidentally in some cases.
Speaker 1: But again, this one too is not correct. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we've actually done at least one whole episode on miasma
Speaker 1: theory before, maybe multiple episodes, So if you go into
Speaker 1: the back catalog you can probably find that somewhere. Um.
Speaker 1: But but Yeah, miasma theory is very interesting, especially because
Speaker 1: it's it's mechanisms are not always easy to nail down.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's generally the idea that there's something in
Speaker 1: the air, often a foul smelling air or some kind
Speaker 1: of bad air or bad vapor, that that could have
Speaker 1: a number of proximate causes of its own. It may
Speaker 1: be air that is caused by a conjunction of the
Speaker 1: planets or something, or it might be released from deep
Speaker 1: in the earth during an earthquake, and all of these
Speaker 1: things might ultimately be something you could trace back to
Speaker 1: a supernatural cause. As many people in Christian Europe would
Speaker 1: they would say, you know, well, here are the proximate causes.
Speaker 1: It's bad air, that would say, released by the planets,
Speaker 1: are released by an earthquake. But ultimately it's God. It's
Speaker 1: God is punishing us, and we'll come back to the
Speaker 1: theological interpretations. In a moment, I was reading a work
Speaker 1: by a historian named Michael W. Doles who lived nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two to nineteen eighty nine, who was a historian
Speaker 1: of medicine and historian to the Middle East. He published
Speaker 1: a book called The Black Death in the Middle East
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, I think it was actually his
Speaker 1: doctoral assertation, but he's a widely cited scholar on this
Speaker 1: subject who and also I want to come back either
Speaker 1: in this episode or in the next episode with more
Speaker 1: recent scholarship that has offered some some critiques of of
Speaker 1: doles as generalizations about about religious responses to the plague.
Speaker 1: So this it's not just like what he says goes
Speaker 1: for all time. But in an essay I was reading
Speaker 1: called the Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death and
Speaker 1: Muslim and Christian Society is published in the seventies. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's writing before he gets into the religious responses, he's
Speaker 1: writing about the dominant mechanistic theories of plague transmission within
Speaker 1: both Christian and Muslim societies. And he writes that both
Speaker 1: of these societies tended to have this same dominant mechanical
Speaker 1: theory of the spread of plague, so both of them
Speaker 1: were largely working from miasma theory, like you're talking about
Speaker 1: the idea that plague is caused by bad air. And
Speaker 1: this is because communities of of both religions were largely
Speaker 1: drawing on the same medical traditions like you mentioned hippocerty
Speaker 1: ease the elaboration on Hippocrates by Galen, but then also
Speaker 1: even sina Or also known as Avicenna, and as a
Speaker 1: result of the belief in miasma theory, a common preventative
Speaker 1: to infection under this theory is what might be called
Speaker 1: changing the air. And so this could have this could
Speaker 1: have interpretations that would actually be useful even though the
Speaker 1: theory is wrong, and could have interpretations that would be
Speaker 1: completely useless. So it might mean, say, getting out of
Speaker 1: the area where the bad air is. You know, you're
Speaker 1: changing the air by changing your location. So if everybody
Speaker 1: around you is getting infected, that probably means there's some
Speaker 1: bad air around and you need to get away from it,
Speaker 1: so you could flee. But then also it could mean
Speaker 1: something like sweetening the air. This was a common practice
Speaker 1: of infusing the air you breathe with pleasant sense, like
Speaker 1: herbs or flowers or fresh fruits. And so when you
Speaker 1: see those plague doctor masks like we talked about in
Speaker 1: the in the previous episode, that they might have a
Speaker 1: beak or some kind of protuberance coming from where the
Speaker 1: mouth and the nose would be. That presumably the person
Speaker 1: wearing the mask is breathing through not having a journey
Speaker 1: theory of disease. They were not thinking about trying to
Speaker 1: filter out droplets bearing viral particles. Instead, they were thinking
Speaker 1: about filtering the air coming into your mouth and nose
Speaker 1: with sweet smells. So those protuberances in the mask would
Speaker 1: often be stuffed with herbs or or something like that.
Speaker 1: Right and then and then, I think in at least
Speaker 1: in some cases, the idea too was that there was
Speaker 1: still an opening right next to either nostril so um,
Speaker 1: so that there were a number of problems with that design,
Speaker 1: which again, to be clear, was not would not have
Speaker 1: been in in in use during this time period. It
Speaker 1: would have come centuries later, and there's still some dispute
Speaker 1: as to house widespread they actually were. But despite the
Speaker 1: fact that they come later and they they might not
Speaker 1: have been as widespread as you might get an impression, uh,
Speaker 1: they still do reflect the dominant thinking of out the
Speaker 1: mechanistic causes of disease transmission at the time. UH. And
Speaker 1: it's understandable because you basically have a learned system here
Speaker 1: that matches up closely with some of our natural responses
Speaker 1: to say, revolting or alarming smells. You know we like
Speaker 1: basically aligns up with some of our body's natural defenses
Speaker 1: against potentially poisonous or infectious agents, right, I mean, so
Speaker 1: we have natural disgust reactions that are almost certainly evolved
Speaker 1: to protect us from infectious disease. Like why is it
Speaker 1: that we tend to find the body fluids of of
Speaker 1: other people and animals revolting and like we want to
Speaker 1: get away from them as probably because that is an
Speaker 1: evolved response. An animal that happens to be disgusted by
Speaker 1: body fluids and stays away from them is less likely
Speaker 1: to contract an infectious disease. So that's also an area
Speaker 1: in which even though the person who has this disgusted
Speaker 1: reaction might not understand the mechanisms that, oh, tiny organisms
Speaker 1: might get into my body and then start colonizing and
Speaker 1: infecting me. Uh, the the intuition provided by the disgusted
Speaker 1: reaction is itself protective, even though you you might you
Speaker 1: wouldn't understand the reason why. But anyway, coming back to
Speaker 1: the other half of it, So another way of changing
Speaker 1: the air is to change your location. Right, So if
Speaker 1: you get away from where you perceive there to be
Speaker 1: a cloud of mi asthma, you might also be getting
Speaker 1: yourself away from real vectors of disease, which could be
Speaker 1: a number of things when we talked about different theories
Speaker 1: of this in the last episode, but you could be
Speaker 1: getting yourself away from host populations of infected animals like
Speaker 1: commence al rodents which are carrying fleas which would deliver
Speaker 1: the infectious bite, or away from infected people who could
Speaker 1: possibly be spreading the disease directly, either through droplets that
Speaker 1: they're coughing out leaving the nose and mouth if they
Speaker 1: have pneumonic plague and infection of the lungs, or getting
Speaker 1: away from infected people who are transmitting plague to other
Speaker 1: people through they're human ectoparasites, which is a finding of
Speaker 1: a recent study we we talked about, I think it
Speaker 1: was from eighteen or so that that said the the
Speaker 1: for a number of plague outbreaks, it looks like the
Speaker 1: best explanatory model for how the plague spreads is if
Speaker 1: it's being spread person to person through things like human
Speaker 1: lice and human fleas. But in any case, getting away
Speaker 1: from where plague is is an effective method of protecting
Speaker 1: yourself no matter which of these vectors is the dominant
Speaker 1: one than Now from this point we get into some
Speaker 1: of the more supernatural causes, and we can certainly lump
Speaker 1: these all together and just say all right, supernatural causes
Speaker 1: of the of the disease, of the plague, or we
Speaker 1: can divide them up into a few different categories. On
Speaker 1: one hand, I think we can easily state that the
Speaker 1: supernatural is never the cause of an illness and therefore
Speaker 1: buying large supernatural solutions are not going to work. Um.
Speaker 1: But it roughly speaking, I think we can look at
Speaker 1: three different categories and we can discuss them from there. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, there's the supernatural individual level, so disease
Speaker 1: as a result of sin, like individual sin, a punishment
Speaker 1: for sin, or a test administrated by supernatural forces. Uh,
Speaker 1: generally we're talking about God or an agent of God.
Speaker 1: Medieval thinking tended to limit the extent to which demons
Speaker 1: could actually mess with flesh. This is something that was
Speaker 1: discussed in the had been discussed in the works of Aristotle,
Speaker 1: and Thomas Aquinas had laid in on this. So there
Speaker 1: are certain limits, like the idea that that the devil
Speaker 1: could not turn you into an animal, because that would
Speaker 1: that would be in defiance of natural law. But other
Speaker 1: things were permitted, so you can kind of it gets
Speaker 1: into kind of a messy theological area. Um. But so
Speaker 1: for the most part, when people were looking for a
Speaker 1: cause of the plague, they were not looking to Hell.
Speaker 1: They were looking to Heaven. Yeah. From everything I've been reading,
Speaker 1: this was especially the the overwhelming, uh, supernatural explanation used
Speaker 1: throughout Christian Europe at the time was that that disease,
Speaker 1: especially plague, is in some way a punishment for sin,
Speaker 1: and it often an individual punishment for sin. Uh. And
Speaker 1: of course this could give rise to all kinds of
Speaker 1: the Odyssey type questions right where the Odyssey, of course,
Speaker 1: being the the subject of believers trying to justify the
Speaker 1: ways of God to man. Uh. This could give rise
Speaker 1: to questions like, well, why would innocent children uh be
Speaker 1: catch this disease? You know, they're too young, um to
Speaker 1: to be culpable for sin in the same way adults are.
Speaker 1: And and this was addressed in numerous ways. Some people
Speaker 1: might say, well, it's actually their parents are being punished
Speaker 1: for their sin or uh, you know, and the saying
Speaker 1: that the children will get to go to heaven their
Speaker 1: parents are being punished, or it might be said that
Speaker 1: the children h have disobeyed the commandments to honor thy
Speaker 1: father and mother. So there by being disobedient to their parents,
Speaker 1: they are actually being punished. But yeah, supernatural punishment seems
Speaker 1: to have been an overwhelmingly common interpretation, especially within Christian Europe.
Speaker 1: I do want to add a caveat though about like
Speaker 1: the limited powers of of demonic forces, is that you're
Speaker 1: going to also encounter exceptions to that rule, certainly when
Speaker 1: you're dealing with individual surviving folkloric and mythological ideas. Um.
Speaker 1: But but this is just sort of by and large
Speaker 1: like what the what the how the learned members of
Speaker 1: society would have interpreted the problem. Now, an extension of
Speaker 1: the supernatural individual category is the supernatural group category, which
Speaker 1: were already discussing a little bit here. This is the
Speaker 1: same as previously uh explained, but roughly applied to an
Speaker 1: entire city and entire people or culture, and generally limited
Speaker 1: to you know, the judgment of divine forces. Again, so
Speaker 1: there's something something is wrong in our culture, or in
Speaker 1: our church, or in our kingdom and or in our
Speaker 1: world entirely, we've fallen at ray, and therefore the Almighty
Speaker 1: is punishing us. And then another category and this kind
Speaker 1: of gets down to a lot of the like I say,
Speaker 1: this sort of ground level folkloric um ideas, the idea
Speaker 1: that witchcraft and magic were involved. This is something encountered
Speaker 1: in cultures around the world generally, the idea of that
Speaker 1: disease may be caused by others practicing magic against you. Um.
Speaker 1: This generates ideas concerning whiches and sorcerers, but also leads
Speaker 1: to all manner of mothering and the persecution in response
Speaker 1: to illness. Something bad is happening to us. Illness is here,
Speaker 1: someone is responsible, and we have to do something about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And as as you allude to, and as anyone might
Speaker 1: guess that this particular interpretation kind of really disastrous consequences. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So again, none of these understandings of disease are are
Speaker 1: actually valid, and none of them are really going to work.
Speaker 1: Certainly some of them they seem to work, and then
Speaker 1: they seem to work in certain cases with other illnes
Speaker 1: us is. But then here comes the Black Death with
Speaker 1: just staggering mortality rates. Uh. We got into this a
Speaker 1: bit in the last episode, but I mean, in the
Speaker 1: numbers are going to vary, but I've seen like a
Speaker 1: rough thirty to seventy five percent mortality rate for plague.
Speaker 1: I've seen bubonic with an eight percent mortality rate during
Speaker 1: this time, and I've seen uh, the other varieties of
Speaker 1: plague with you know, upwards of ninety to a hundred
Speaker 1: percent of mortality. So it's uh, you know, staggering numbers
Speaker 1: to consider. Yeah, with pneumonic or septo semic plagues, the
Speaker 1: other two versions, and again they're they're all caused by
Speaker 1: the same bacterium. It's all your cine epestis. It's just
Speaker 1: about how the body gets infected Soneumonic is infection of
Speaker 1: the lung tissue, like if either bubonic plague progresses to
Speaker 1: a lung infection or if you inhale the bacterium directly
Speaker 1: and it gives you a primary lung infection, that'sneumonic plague.
Speaker 1: Septo semic plague is infection of the blood stream with
Speaker 1: the your cine epestis. And either way, uh yeah, these
Speaker 1: are just absolutely devas dating like without without very quick
Speaker 1: antibiotic treatments. And and I do think it's important to
Speaker 1: stress that even in the modern world, with these versions
Speaker 1: of plague, you've got to catch it early with the
Speaker 1: antibiotics to be effective because these uh, these forms of
Speaker 1: the disease can progress shockingly rapidly. There there are stories
Speaker 1: from the Middle Ages of uh, you know, people people
Speaker 1: going to bed seemingly okay and then just being dead
Speaker 1: by the next morning. It's a shockingly rapid progression. And uh.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the the mortality rates without early antibiotic intervention
Speaker 1: or somewhere near a hundred percent. Now, some of the
Speaker 1: prevention and treatment practices of the day were certainly in
Speaker 1: line with the four humors and the miasma theory um
Speaker 1: on the later front, and one of the most consequence
Speaker 1: real views was that again one could just simply move
Speaker 1: from an area with bad air to one with better air.
Speaker 1: But all of this was more prevalent in the early
Speaker 1: days of the Black Death um. As it progressed, you
Speaker 1: saw more of a turning to potential religious cures and
Speaker 1: religious treatments religious responses to the plague. Yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you are following this view in in Christian that's very
Speaker 1: common in Christian Europe, that the plague is being caused
Speaker 1: by sin and it is a punishment for sin, then
Speaker 1: you would think that the primary way of alleviating it
Speaker 1: would be doing something about the underlying cause, doing something
Speaker 1: about the state of sin that you're in, and trying
Speaker 1: to fix that in order to get God to relent
Speaker 1: with the disaster. Yeah, and so I like the most
Speaker 1: obvious treatment here is Okay, if if God has allowed
Speaker 1: this to happen or cause this to happen, I need
Speaker 1: to get on the phone with God. And I do
Speaker 1: have a way, I have a direct line. I can pray,
Speaker 1: we can all pray. And so that was one method
Speaker 1: turned to prayer, prayer to God, and various other other
Speaker 1: religious approaches come into play. To hear the use of
Speaker 1: ambulence and charms as a means of of aiding prayer
Speaker 1: or as as a means of hecting against plague, even
Speaker 1: as the idea that some form of contagion was taking place,
Speaker 1: like the idea that it was that that they became
Speaker 1: apparent that something was happening, it was somehow spreading from
Speaker 1: person to person. Even if you got into this view,
Speaker 1: there was still the idea, well, an amulet can stand
Speaker 1: between me and that it can be the thing that
Speaker 1: protects me. Um And when this didn't appear to work,
Speaker 1: we can certainly understand why more extreme methods were then
Speaker 1: explored like, if prayer doesn't work and amulets are not working,
Speaker 1: then maybe I'm not trying hard enough, and therefore God
Speaker 1: is still not removing this plague from my shoulders. And
Speaker 1: here you get into some of the most interesting theological
Speaker 1: reasoning that that appeared in Christian Europe in response to
Speaker 1: the plague, which is picking up on on pre existing
Speaker 1: ideas about the powers of the mortification of the flesh. Yes,
Speaker 1: the various flagulent groups for example, Um, you've probably seen
Speaker 1: art and uh you know, and you've seen paintings depicting
Speaker 1: these individuals before, often people in white clothing UM, going
Speaker 1: making like minor parades through the streets, whipping or flailing oneself,
Speaker 1: drawing blood from one's back, thus staining the white garments
Speaker 1: that you're wearing. UM as an act of penance. UM.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about these is that these groups
Speaker 1: practicing the mortification of the flesh in public rituals as
Speaker 1: a means of of seeking penance during times of great
Speaker 1: suffering and fear. These existed prior to the Black Death. UM.
Speaker 1: You find these during the thirteenth century, and during the
Speaker 1: thirteenth century they had already reached the point of heresy
Speaker 1: or the charge of heresy by the church, as it
Speaker 1: became a sort of grassroots means of removing one's sin effectively,
Speaker 1: or or at least to the powers that be, seeming
Speaker 1: to come dangerously close to cutting the power of the
Speaker 1: Church out of the equation, because what do you need
Speaker 1: church for when the power to remove sins resides in
Speaker 1: your own hands and your own flails um Even more
Speaker 1: so when this idea generates that merely witnessing a progression
Speaker 1: of flagelens through the streets can remove your sins. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to picture a procession, a flagulent procession, people
Speaker 1: moving in formation through the streets punishing their own bodies
Speaker 1: in order to enact the mortification of the flesh. And
Speaker 1: and by the way, the mortification of the flesh, I
Speaker 1: mean these people did point to sort of passages in
Speaker 1: the Bible that could be interpreted as giving them license
Speaker 1: to to enact this kind of spiritual dealing where the
Speaker 1: you know, punishing the body or denying the body pleasure
Speaker 1: and inflicting pain on the body could in some way
Speaker 1: purify you in the eyes of God. Like there, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there are passages in like the Book
Speaker 1: of Romans, where where the apostle Paul writes that for
Speaker 1: if you live after the flesh, you shall die. But
Speaker 1: if you live through the spirit, and through the spirit
Speaker 1: do mortify the deeds of your body, you will live. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and ultimately the mortification of the flesh. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: flagulent rights and so forth. It gets kind of it
Speaker 1: gets really complicated. I think we've looked into the some
Speaker 1: past episodes of the show, because you know, you're dealing
Speaker 1: with with with with the pain and pleasure network of
Speaker 1: the brain. Um, you're dealing with with complex you know,
Speaker 1: mythic histories of suffering and the meaning of suffering, and
Speaker 1: so we see rights of this nature in religions around
Speaker 1: the world. It's it's it's nothing that's you know, completely
Speaker 1: isolated to these movements we're discussing here. Yeah, that's right. Oh,
Speaker 1: but I forgot sorry, I forgot to complete the thought
Speaker 1: I started a moment ago. I was going to mention.
Speaker 1: I was going to mention that flagelent groups and flagulent
Speaker 1: processions of the Middle Ages are parodied, uh, to to
Speaker 1: great effect in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Do
Speaker 1: you remember the part where the monks the brotherhood. They're
Speaker 1: walking through the streets and beating their own faces with
Speaker 1: the wooden boards. Yep, yeah, that's that's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of I mean those guys, especially with Terry Jones. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they were very well read on on medieval thought,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, it's it makes sense that we would
Speaker 1: find such a great parody there. But certainly, yeah, to
Speaker 1: get back to the point here, like these groups who
Speaker 1: are around this line of thinking already existed, and during
Speaker 1: the fourteenth century, the Black Death stirred this reaction again
Speaker 1: for for obvious recent reasons, and so the practice surged,
Speaker 1: and the practice even peaked during this time. Um uh,
Speaker 1: you know, people were realizing these other forms of prayer
Speaker 1: and religious right, we're not working. What is the next level?
Speaker 1: We should take things too, well, maybe we should take
Speaker 1: to the streets like this. Yeah, I do think it's
Speaker 1: interesting that the mortification of the flesh idea took on
Speaker 1: this public display. Uh. And I'm sure it wasn't always
Speaker 1: a public display, but like, why why in the cases
Speaker 1: of the people who led these procession ends in the streets,
Speaker 1: was it not enough just to mortify your flesh or
Speaker 1: punish your body in private? Why did you need to
Speaker 1: do it as a group in public? What was that
Speaker 1: accomplishing specifically? And I don't know the answer to that question.
Speaker 1: You know, it probably gets into some of what we
Speaker 1: discussed in our Tears episodes. You know that it's it's
Speaker 1: one thing to have an emotional outpouring that is individual
Speaker 1: or in or in a case of a you know,
Speaker 1: sort of religious situation, a one on one communication with God.
Speaker 1: But if it is public and communal, then it takes
Speaker 1: on a different power. Now, there's an important distinction to
Speaker 1: be made here between just the practice and the movement
Speaker 1: of of of the flagelence here, because just the mere
Speaker 1: practice of the mortification of the flesh was largely considered
Speaker 1: an accepted form of penance within the church. But then
Speaker 1: when we talk about the movement, we're talking about something
Speaker 1: that is sometimes described as a man that ultimately was
Speaker 1: beyond the control of the church. And that's where we
Speaker 1: see the crackdown on groups such as these UH and
Speaker 1: also sometimes those crackdowns were rolled up in the persecution
Speaker 1: of other heresies. Yeah, that's right, because a number of
Speaker 1: things could count as supposed mortification of the flesh, and
Speaker 1: these would be all kinds of things you hear about.
Speaker 1: You know, Christians in the Middle Ages doing in a
Speaker 1: totally sanctioned way all the time, like fasting is a
Speaker 1: friend of mortification of the flesh. You are denying yourself
Speaker 1: fleshly carnal pleasures in in terms of food or whatever,
Speaker 1: or even just um assuming poses that are uncomfortable for
Speaker 1: long periods of time as a way of turning your
Speaker 1: mind to God, like kneeling for long periods or something.
Speaker 1: But you're making the distinction that that in the in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, there arose these movements that were sort
Speaker 1: of organized and highly devoted to the flagellent practice, and
Speaker 1: these were sometimes condemned and seen as troublemakers by the
Speaker 1: church authorities. Right, and you can you know, it ultimately
Speaker 1: gets to know complex area because you can say, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if the church believes that they have the path to salvation,
Speaker 1: it's their job to keep people from altering the recipe
Speaker 1: to the point where it's no longer producing the desired
Speaker 1: results or you know, causing greater harm um. But then
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you know, it's it is also
Speaker 1: about power. You know, if if if a group has
Speaker 1: determined that it is that it has reached the point
Speaker 1: where it is limiting the power of the church. Though
Speaker 1: then it's it becomes a threat to the church. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But another thing we should, of course say is that
Speaker 1: the threats represented by these flagulent groups, it was not
Speaker 1: just a threat to the authority of the church structure.
Speaker 1: They were also doing very bad things in some cases,
Speaker 1: like there were cases where flagellent groups were involved in, say,
Speaker 1: the persecution of minority groups within the communities, right and
Speaker 1: and yeah, and that's where we get to another huge
Speaker 1: area that comes out of the religious response to the
Speaker 1: Black Death, um, the persecution of minority groups, including the
Speaker 1: the persecution of Jewish communities. So Jewish communities were often
Speaker 1: had often been the target of let's say, blood libel
Speaker 1: and accusations of various crimes and events. Um. And in
Speaker 1: response to the Black Death, there were vile accusations that
Speaker 1: the plague outbreaks were due to Jewish people poisoning wells. Now, certainly,
Speaker 1: well poisoning has been used as a weapon of war,
Speaker 1: had been used since in war and conflict since very
Speaker 1: ancient times. We see accounts of it being used by
Speaker 1: the Assyrians and others. But there was no well poisoning
Speaker 1: going on here, and it's it's not it's not even
Speaker 1: how this particular illness would have readily spread. Right. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting article that I was reading about about
Speaker 1: some of this, Peter Schwarzstein's The History of Poisoning of
Speaker 1: the Well in Smithsonian, which gets into this larger trend
Speaker 1: like how far back does this go, especially in ancient
Speaker 1: you know, Mesopotamian conflict. But the author also gets into
Speaker 1: these accusations of well poisoning a little bit during the
Speaker 1: Black Death. I also found a very good ride up
Speaker 1: on specifically the the anti Semitic activities during the Black
Speaker 1: Death on Jewish history dot org that has a has
Speaker 1: a good write up. Now, it should be stated that
Speaker 1: this was not the first time in history there had
Speaker 1: been anti Jewish persecution in Europe, but this was you
Speaker 1: know that that was a long tradition, going back in
Speaker 1: many ways to the early days of the Church. Um.
Speaker 1: But this was a big spike in it. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: um and and and so that that line of behavior,
Speaker 1: that line of of lashing out with hatred against um,
Speaker 1: against the Jewish people and other minority communities. Uh, like,
Speaker 1: that was already established. So then comes to the Black Death. Uh,
Speaker 1: these other religious options were kind of explored and in
Speaker 1: some cases eventually exhausted, you know, asking yourself, well, why
Speaker 1: are we being punished? Is it because of a failure
Speaker 1: in the Crusades, is it rampants sin, is it probably
Speaker 1: problems in the church, etcetera. Uh So, yeah, they end
Speaker 1: up turning them to these Jewish communities, and the idea
Speaker 1: of mass poisoning um by Jewish communities was something that
Speaker 1: had already been raised in previous persecution UH efforts, sometimes
Speaker 1: with lepers thrown into the accusation as well. You know,
Speaker 1: so it gets into this whole conspiracy based illogical territory
Speaker 1: of like, you know, the Jewish people and and lepers
Speaker 1: working together to poison us and create disease. And as
Speaker 1: a Shortstein points out in his article, this was already happening,
Speaker 1: you know, before the Black Death, in response to a
Speaker 1: lot of water borne illnesses, for example. But then the
Speaker 1: Black Death gave it new life, and so you saw
Speaker 1: regulations put in place and in UH cities like Vienna
Speaker 1: where Jewish people were banned from consuming food, h and
Speaker 1: drink that was intended for Christians. And this madness basically
Speaker 1: continue till the fifteenth century, and along the way we
Speaker 1: saw the persecution and the slaughter of Jews, the Roman
Speaker 1: the Roman people, as well other minority groups. Pope Clement
Speaker 1: the six Um actually outlawed it in an attempt to
Speaker 1: protect Jewish communities, but uh, that only worked so much.
Speaker 1: I mean, the horrible acts of expulsion and genocide continued.
Speaker 1: So one of the again the really interesting things about
Speaker 1: all of this is that again none of these religion
Speaker 1: based attempts to thwart the plague really worked. And to
Speaker 1: a large extent, the Church of the fourteenth century was
Speaker 1: just met with this terrible test um and they failed.
Speaker 1: People turned to the Church and it was unable to help.
Speaker 1: Unable to help in the larger sense of preventing the illness,
Speaker 1: but even the smaller instances of providing a framework for
Speaker 1: the suffering. Uh. There was a lot of pessimism during
Speaker 1: this period toward the powers that be, and you can
Speaker 1: read accounts of say, churchmen not interacting with the lay
Speaker 1: people out of fear of death, and that included say,
Speaker 1: like last rites for the dying. So there was this
Speaker 1: idea that the church was for aking people, just as
Speaker 1: people were forsaking each other. In the wake of this illness. H. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's actually interesting debate from the time period about about
Speaker 1: what is the appropriate course of action for for Christians
Speaker 1: and for the clergy in reaction to the plague. Like,
Speaker 1: like a big question was should you flee the plague
Speaker 1: or not? Or should you stay? Should you flee or
Speaker 1: should you stay to help your Christian brethren? And actually,
Speaker 1: like there's a whole Martin Luther essay where he talks
Speaker 1: about the this this debate, this argument about whether you
Speaker 1: should whether you have a duty to stay, or whether
Speaker 1: you should you should flee. Yeah. And now this is
Speaker 1: not to say that that everyone up just outright abandoned Christianity,
Speaker 1: but there was there was an increased turning away from
Speaker 1: the church in search of quote, a different understanding of
Speaker 1: the Christian message and walk of faith. This according to
Speaker 1: Joshua J. Mark, who wrote about it in in These
Speaker 1: Religious Responses to the Black Death. Uh. This you also
Speaker 1: get into this argument that ultimately this kind of religious
Speaker 1: crisis uh in Europe kind of laid the groundwork for
Speaker 1: the Protestant Reformation of later centuries. Yeah. Martin Luther's famous
Speaker 1: theses were published in the early sixteenth century. I believe
Speaker 1: like the fifteen teens at some point. And uh, and
Speaker 1: of course you know, at the time, in the centuries
Speaker 1: following the Black Death itself in the fourteenth century, there
Speaker 1: were still recurrent waves of plague popping up here and
Speaker 1: there throughout Europe. So it wasn't like the plague went
Speaker 1: away after the Black Death, as we've talked about, the
Speaker 1: plague continued to be an ongoing issue for the centuries
Speaker 1: that followed. Yeah. Absolutely. Now I want to come back
Speaker 1: to very briefly to one of the sources I I
Speaker 1: cited last time, Uh, the Anthropology of Plague by Sharon
Speaker 1: in de Witt, published in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World.
Speaker 1: From so, as the author points out, the Black Death
Speaker 1: initiated or accelerated social, demographic, and economic changes throughout the region. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there there are changes that were already in motion
Speaker 1: to some degree, but the Black Death arguably sped them
Speaker 1: up and made them more urgent, more actionable, etcetera. Though
Speaker 1: again that we get into this this very difficult to
Speaker 1: m to hammer out area of trying to imagine what
Speaker 1: the future would have been like had something not occurred,
Speaker 1: Like what would what was the trajectory of of religion
Speaker 1: in Europe um and and how would an absence of
Speaker 1: plague have affected that trajectory, Because even if you took
Speaker 1: plague out of the scenario, you still had famine, you
Speaker 1: still had war, you still had people suffering and living
Speaker 1: this um you know often you know, degraded standard of
Speaker 1: living within a feudal system. So all of those elements
Speaker 1: were still in place. All of those elements were already uh,
Speaker 1: you know, pushing some of the changes to come. So
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's difficult to tease it all
Speaker 1: apart and and try and figure out what would have
Speaker 1: happened had the plague not happened, and if not this plague,
Speaker 1: I mean, potentially some other plague. It's not like this
Speaker 1: was the only illness affecting the people of Europe during
Speaker 1: these centuries. And as as we've mentioned previously, of course,
Speaker 1: it's important to keep in mind that despite the sort
Speaker 1: of Eurocentric dominance of the historical analyzes of the of
Speaker 1: the plague that exists, the the Second Plague pandemic did
Speaker 1: not only affect Christian Europe, I mean, it affected large
Speaker 1: portions of the world, affected Europe, Africa, and Asia. And
Speaker 1: so another really interesting area of study is looking at
Speaker 1: Islamic societies and and how they reacted to the plague
Speaker 1: in their own ways. Now, as I've mentioned several times,
Speaker 1: this is an area that seems somewhat complicated, because, much
Speaker 1: like the scientific history of the plague pandemic itself, the
Speaker 1: subject of the Islamic religious response to plague has I
Speaker 1: think undergone some recent revision and re examination. Um looking
Speaker 1: at the time, I think we maybe do need to
Speaker 1: save most of this discussion for the next episode. But
Speaker 1: just as a hint of things to come, I did
Speaker 1: want to read a passage that I found really haunting.
Speaker 1: This was cited in again that essay I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: by Michael W. Doles from the seventies UH and so
Speaker 1: Doles is pointing out that while the majority of historical scholarship,
Speaker 1: especially at the time he was writing, but probably still
Speaker 1: the majority of scholarship on the Second Plague pandemic, has
Speaker 1: focused on its effects on Europe, it was also extremely
Speaker 1: destructive and historically significant in the Muslim world at the time,
Speaker 1: including in the Middle East, in North Africa and Andalusia
Speaker 1: and so forth. And UH to describe this state of affairs,
Speaker 1: Dolls quotes from a fourteenth century Arab Muslim historian and
Speaker 1: philosopher named even Caldoon. Uh. Even Caldoon is a very
Speaker 1: important intellectual of the Middle Ages who did work that
Speaker 1: I think could be seen as a pre cursor to
Speaker 1: many of the social sciences. So he did work sort
Speaker 1: of examining different uh you know, things that might be
Speaker 1: considered sociology later. And he tried to do sort of
Speaker 1: political analysis of the course of empires and and and
Speaker 1: uh in their economic histories and things like this. But
Speaker 1: he also wrote about the plague that was taking place
Speaker 1: during his own lifetime. And so I want to read
Speaker 1: a passage that's translated here by Rosenthal. Even Caldoon rights
Speaker 1: in the middle of the eighth century, and that would
Speaker 1: be the eighth century by the calendar he was working with.
Speaker 1: We as what we've been referring to as the fourteenth century,
Speaker 1: civilization in the East and West was visited by a
Speaker 1: destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.
Speaker 1: It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization
Speaker 1: and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the
Speaker 1: time of their sinility, when they had reached the limit
Speaker 1: of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence.
Speaker 1: It weakened their authority, their situation a pro the point
Speaker 1: of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind.
Speaker 1: Cities and buildings were laid, waste, roads and way signs
Speaker 1: were obliterated. Settlements and mansions became empty, Dynasties and tribes
Speaker 1: grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems,
Speaker 1: was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion
Speaker 1: to its civilization. The author gives a note that's, according
Speaker 1: to Caldoun's estimation, the East's more affluent civilization, and then
Speaker 1: he finishes by writing, it was as if the voice
Speaker 1: of existence in the world had called out for oblivion
Speaker 1: and restriction in the world had responded to its call.
Speaker 1: What a harrowing piece of writing. That is amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that gave me goose bumps a little bit there.
Speaker 1: And then really it drives home so many of the
Speaker 1: points we've been we've been making, or that have been
Speaker 1: made in the sources we've been siting here. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and and Doles actually fills in that even Caldoon himself, law,
Speaker 1: his parents, and a number of his teachers uh to
Speaker 1: the Black Death. He I think he was living in
Speaker 1: Tunis at the time, in modern day Tunisia, but he
Speaker 1: dwelled in North Africa at the time, and of course
Speaker 1: it was affected, just like the the other side of
Speaker 1: the Mediterranean was. All right. Well, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: gonna go and close out this part two, but we'll
Speaker 1: be back with part three next week, I believe on Tuesday,
Speaker 1: so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, you'll find him in the Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind podcast feed We have core episodes on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener Mail on Mondays, Artifact on Wednesdays.
Speaker 1: On Friday we do a little weird House Cinema. That's
Speaker 1: our time to just mostly discuss a weird movie. And
Speaker 1: on the weekends we run a vault episode, which is
Speaker 1: a fancy way of saying we do a rerun. Huge
Speaker 1: thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
Speaker 1: to topic for the future, or just to say hello.
Speaker 1: You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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