I have wondered how our experience of this pandemic — saturated as it is with competing models, charts, and technical experts — compares to that of the average person who survived either of the two major medieval outbreaks of the bubonic plague. In some ways, the two experiences are not so different. They had their clerics; we have ours. We struggle to complete funerary rituals in an age of social distancing; the medievals could hardly keep up with the sheer number of the deceased. As a chronicler from a plague-ridden Florentine recorded:
All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried . . . At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.
Medievals did not have our bureaucratic and media infrastructure, designed to inform us of each and every development in the fight against a lethal and contagious disease. Of course, information about the virus is — to understate the point — useful. I certainly would not suggest we trade our experience for theirs. But the modern proliferation of information exacts a certain psychic cost over and beyond the pandemic itself — I have, on occasion, wondered if there was a morbid comfort to be found in being spared the dueling opinions of experts and their models.
Bonnie Kristian at The Week has a thoughtful piece on the burden — and necessity — of COVID knowledge, and the false appeal of “blissful ignorance” about the virus. She highlights the experience of Europeans living through the Black Death to illustrate that our impulsive longing for a virus that “would arrive and claim its victims fairly quickly” is in tension with the desperation our ancestors felt to understand the plague that befell them:
When the Black Death spread through Europe, people knew it was coming. “Since the 11th century, when the village became the seat of the English Crown, Westminster has witnessed many dramatic moments, but none of equal gravity to that of September 1348, when the pestilence was rushing toward London inland from Bristol and Oxford and along the coast from Wiltshire and Hampshire,” writes narrative historian John Kelly in The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. “That September, one imagines scenes of high drama at Westminster Palace,” Kelly continues, “Edward III and his ministers anxiously studying maps; clerks furiously scribbling orders; messengers scurrying from office to office; and arriving horsemen shouting out the latest news from the fronts at Hampshire and Bath and Winchester.”
Cambridge University medievalist John Hatcher likewise speaks in The Black Death: A Personal History of medieval people’s “vast appetite for news,” even in rural areas, which they obtained via the travels of monks, merchants, and nobles. And plague historian Ole J. Benedictow of the University of Oslo, in his Complete History of the 1346-1353 outbreak, includes accounts of church leaders issuing orders anticipating imminent pestilence.