In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  Now these university graduates preaching Lollardy in country and town could advertise their superior qualifications as Christ’s ministers to those often displayed by downscale newly ordained clergy and monks.

  The Lollards with their superior learning and unwavering piety—in contrast to the now-tattered norm of ecclesiastical staffing—were able to set up counter-churches. When their teachings were too democratic and revolutionary for irate royal officers and courtiers, the Lollards withdrew to distant districts among the northern granges and ranches. They were still there in the 1530s when Henry VIII broke with Rome so he could make an honest married woman of his pregnant mistress.

  Changes in artistic style as well as spirituality have commonly been attributed to the Black Death.

  In 1951 the art historian Millard Meiss saw this trend in north Italian painting after the Black Death—a more religious, less humanistic style. Meiss postulated a throwback to the abstractions of twelfth-century art and away from the naturalistic humanism of Giotto in 1300. This indeed may have happened in Florentine and Sienese art in the two or three decades after the Black Death. But not necessarily for intellectual reasons. The small number of progressive ateliers following Giotto’s innovative naturalistic humanism were possibly wiped out by the plague. The conservative ateliers, the majority, remained sufficiently active and followed the old twelfth-century abstractionist style.

  By the time Meiss wrote his classic work in 1951, the connection between higher culture and social change that had been propounded by the Marxists of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and the Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, had come to be widely accepted and applied in academic circles.

  It was the theory of structure: An economically shaped society determines the superstructures of art, literature, philosophy, and science. The European Marxists postulated the possibility of a small degree of autonomy for the superstructure only after it had been established on its material and social base, and Meiss’s book is an example of this flawed theory.

  What we have come to know about cultural change in the twentieth century from experience and observation raises doubts about the structure/superstructure paradigm. There is an integral aesthetic, psychological, highly personal quality to innovative art. Aspects of craftsmanship also enter into the making of a style. Great art and literature elude the rules of sociology.

  In England there was a parallel increased austerity in architectural style, which can be attributed to the Black Death—a shift from the Decorated version of French Gothic, which featured elaborate sculptures and glass, to a more spare style called Perpendicular, with sharper profiles of buildings and corners, less opulent, rounded, and effete than Decorated. It may be due to more mundane causes—running out of the supply of French masons and sculptors because of much lower immigration into England during the Hundred Years War, as well as a modicum of nationalist puritanism opposed to French decadence during that era. The cause may have been economic—less capital to spend on decoration because of heavy war taxation and reduction of estate incomes because of labor shortage and higher peasants’ wages.

  Can we say something more firmly about the connection between the Black Death and the Italian fifteenth-century Renaissance—its humanistic learning, its more accessible literature, its more naturalistic depiction of the human face and body in painting and sculpture?

  The Black Death hit many of the great cities of northern Italy very hard. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron uses the realistic flight of the Florentine rich and beautiful to the—they hoped—safer countryside and the glitterati’s diversion there by telling and listening to sexually charged stories as a framing device for his volume of romantic and sarcastic tales.

  Since the Decameron is considered one of the launchpads of the Renaissance, and since the historian William Bowsky in the 1960s discovered in the archives of nearby Siena an affluent merchant whose five children died in the plague, the question has arisen: Did biomedical trauma then somehow trigger the Italian Renaissance?

  Perhaps it had some impact on consciousness, but the trend developed in the fifteenth century of Renaissance culture was in the direction not of more soul searching but of a more earthly and secular experience. Perhaps the Black Death weakened faith in traditional medieval Catholic spirituality and set off a quest for a deeper naturalistic understanding of human psychology and behavior and the expression of a more personal sensibility.

  This possible tangential result of biomedical devastation scarcely diminishes what we know to have been the main driving forces in Italian Renaissance culture—a very rich and politically powerful high bourgeoisie trying to establish its own identity relative to aristocratic and ecclesiastical sensibility by recalling and identifying with the frame of mind, taste, and behavioral patterns of the ruling class of ancient Rome portrayed in its abundant literature and surviving art.

  Somewhere in the common unconscious there may have sounded the tocsin that the Black Death was the symbolic psychological decline of the old world of the European Middle Ages. It was time to get on with the new and modern, given added legitimacy by renewed classicism. But like all of cultural history, this is just an ephemeral and unprovable observation.

  In 1919 Johan Huizinga was sure that the late medieval Western European culture was characterized by a noticeably increased scrutiny of and reflection on death. This enhanced consciousness of morbidity was held to have been expressed in the art and literature of what he called the autumn—or waning—of the Middle Ages.

  Since Huizinga two remarkable books have explored this theme. Jean Delemeau of the French school of social and cultural history in 1991 perceived the sharp rise of a sense of sin and fear after 1300. He saw “the emergence of a Western guilt culture,” which endured until the eighteenth century. In 1996, Paul Binski, the Cambridge University art historian, highlighted the sense of the macabre in late medieval culture. Binski tells us that fourteenth-century penitential expression stresses “that the individual is subjected to the inevitability of the larger and ineluctable order of mortality.” More elaborate and sometimes eccentric funeral arrangements represent for Binski “a masochistic reversed decorum by which courtly aristocratic norms of behavior could be exposed in all their elegant vacuity.” Binski goes on to speak of the rise of Delemeau’s guilt culture, centered in “the macabre” and—suddenly remembering the Renaissance—he boldly claims that “secular individualism and guilt culture represent two sides of the same coin,” a familiar Freudian ambiguity.

  Death imagery in late medieval literature and art, Binski concludes, “is fundamental to the ways a culture thinks and to the way it allegorizes meaning.” But he discounts that the advent of the macabre “was owed to a specific exogenous, external, socially contextual cause like the Black Death. This period of the macabre . . . can only be understood by seeing it as an internal development of medieval visual culture itself.” He is scathing in his critique of Millard Meiss’s 1951 social reductionism, and acutely suggests that one of the key paintings used by Meiss to show the reversion to spiritual abstraction (or “transcendentalism”) after the Black Death may have actually been executed before the Great Plague—the perils of art history.

  The Huizinga-invented, Delemeau- and Binski-articulated increase in death consciousness in the fourteenth century may very well be the work of retrospective imagination that historians of all kinds frequently exercise. There is no change in the intellectual quality of death theology between 1200 and 1400. What was visibly different was a quantitative increase in expression of this morbidity in art and literature. This was due to increased artistic and literary productivity and the chance survival of texts and artworks.

  If, however, Huizinga, Delemeau, and Binski are right and there was a qualitative, intellectual rise of a death culture, that development may have significantly affected the manner of social response to the Black Death. A culture so extremely focused on mortality, sin, and macabre, posthumous punishm
ent would be in a poor state of mind to take practical steps to counter the Great Pestilence. A society moving toward secular individualism and nonhierarchical communal action might have been expected to take more affirmative action to counter the plague through improvements in medical science and social organization. But there were no such advancements. If European culture indeed entered a new era of death consciousness, funeral ritualization, extravagant guilt, and macabre imaging after 1300, this cultural ambiance facilitated the incapacity for human responses to the Black Death. The Black Death did not create the Dance of Death; in other words, the causality ran the other way.

  The Black Death’s impact on the course of the Hundred Years War is much more clear than its tenuous relationship to the Italian Renaissance. At a time when infantry had become central to English tactics, the cost of soldiers drawn from the peasantry increased because of the drastic population decline from the plague. This meant a sharp escalation in military personnel expenses for the English monarchy and made the ultimate English victory much more costly and difficult.

  Without the Black Death and the 40 percent reduction in the peasant population from whom the infantry were drawn, it is just possible that the Plantagenets would have made themselves kings of France. After the Pestilence and demographic crash that was a task too challenging even for the relatively advanced taxation system of the medieval English state.

  In the end what happened to the Plantagenets’ Anglo-French empire was very similar to the fate of the Roman Empire. Both were brought low by a biomedical devastation that caused a sharp fall in the size of the working and military population. Both were grand edifices undone by the specter of infectious disease and pandemics. There is a lesson for the American empire today in that situation.

  The cataclysm of the Black Death weakened the foundations of medieval kingship. In the words of Shakespeare in Richard II, still in some ways the best account of that pathetic and unstable figure, it threatened to “wash the balm from off an anointed king.”

  Medieval kingship was built on foundations that ran back centuries in time: divine grace attributed to kingship’s office by the Church; Roman imperial and legal authority; war leadership and national feeling derived from Germanic sources. Edward III and his heir Edward the Black Prince had shown that they could win battles in France but had nothing with which to fight the Pestilence. They ran to their most remote country estates to save themselves and left nothing for society to do except pray.

  The Black Prince, struck down by malaria from his ill-fated Spanish invasion, predeceased his aged, venereal-disease-ridden father. It was the Black Prince’s wan, nervous, uneasy, high-strung son who succeeded the old man in 1377.

  Richard II’s twenty-year reign ended in the ignominy of his forced abdication in 1399, as a denouement of a small revolution, concocted by Richard’s first cousin Henry of Lancaster, John of Gaunt’s son. Previously Richard had banished his rival Henry Bolingbroke from the kingdom, then mischievously—in unchivalric manner—deprived Henry of access to the wealth of his Lancastrian lands. Henry invaded England from France with a small mercenary army while Richard was fighting an unsuccessful war in dismal Ireland and the nobility, the churchmen, and many of the king’s own courtiers rallied to Lancaster.

  By the time Richard made it back to England he was utterly powerless. Henry forced his abdication, and then to make sure of his cousin’s elimination, called a Parliament that declared Richard a tyrant, a Romanist enemy of the common law, and deposed him. Parliament made Henry king, filling the vacant throne with the artful and seemingly benign usurper. Richard was taken off to a rural castle and was likely starved to death.

  Contemporary writers and modern historians have suggested a variety of scenarios to account for the downfall of Richard II.

  He was, said William Stubbs in 1870, a tyrant who claimed with Roman pretension that law was in his own mouth and breast and had to be done away with because of such unconstitutional ideas and behavior. Richard had to be removed so that the proto-modern “Lancastrian constitution” could be activated.

  A second explanation, offered by recent biographers Nigel Saul and Michael Bennett: Richard, like John Lackland and Edward II, lacked the political temperament to be king. A man of learning, piety, and fine aesthetic taste, Richard interacted awkwardly and impatiently with the great nobility. They experienced his mood swings and ferocious anger and finally got tired of him and afraid of his next moves. Lancaster’s bonhomie seemed much more accommodating. This interpretation resembles Shakespeare’s play, which Saul strongly admired.

  A third explanation, suggested at the time: Richard was homosexual. There were no children from his diplomatic marriage to Ann of Bohemia. Like Edward II, he built up an inner set of gay courtiers. This inflamed aristocratic mistrust with regard to the rationale behind royal patronage and antagonized the bishops, who had long departed from the early medieval church’s tolerance of homoerotic behavior.

  Richard tried hard. He brooded over what to do, how to build up his image, how to relate to the nobility and other people. Feverishly dissatisfied with one course of action and one set of friends, he swung in jagged fashion to contradicting policies and groups. He knew that peace with France was necessary for the welfare of his kingdom but characteristically was never able to negotiate a durable peace settlement. Over the last three years of his reign he became vengeful, paranoid, and increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Nobility and Parliament reluctantly concluded that Henry of Lancaster was a better or at least less dangerous man.

  What really haunted Richard was the cataclysm of the Black Death, of the shadow of extermination falling upon society while the proud Plantagenet monarchy stood muted or ran away to escape into the safer countryside. Richard tried to restore royal leadership through activist control over events in the manner of Henry II, Edward I, and his grandfather Edward III. But he did not know what to do except to act in an arbitrary and noisome manner.

  Shakespeare was right that Richard II was a tragic figure. His tragedy was rooted in a compulsive desire to restore the grand and popular Plantagenet monarchy that inexplicable biomedical calamity had assaulted.

  Henry of Lancaster as king (1399–1413) was not much more successful. He exhibited not hyperactivity but lassitude and indecisiveness. Like Richard II, Henry IV was frustrated and stymied by a postplague condition of radically diminished human resources.

  Henry IV’s son Henry V (1413–1422) revived the Hundred Years War and archaically regained military luster and national pride for the monarchy by his lucky win at Agincourt in 1415. Seven years later Henry V died prematurely as he seemed about to become king of France. He left a child king who grew up into a mentally deficient and unstable adult. Henry VI (1422–61) brought down the proud Lancastrian family, losing their French empire and then the throne itself to his ruthless Yorkist relatives.

  It was a long way down from the sunny day when Princess Joan in 1348 had sailed from Portsmouth to Bordeaux to journey to Castile and there build through marriage the Plantagenet empire in Spain. When Joan landed on the quay in Bordeaux harbor the rise of the Plantagenets to European dominance seemed unstoppable. The bacillus from a flea-ridden rat or consumption of beef from a sick cow that killed her altered the course of European political development for the next hundred years.

  The biomedical catastrophe took away charisma from kings, eroded popular support for their veneration and self-esteem as God’s anointed and as war leaders and money providers. It drove a sensitive, intelligent monarch like Richard II toward anguished behavior and antisocial, politically imprudent policy that led the nobility headed by his cousin to bring him down and kill him.

  In 1400, the year that Richard II perished in bleak Pontefract Castle, England’s greatest medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, also died. The king and poet would have known each other slightly, Chaucer being a leading court poet, an assiduous servant of the Lancastrian family, a diplomat, and a collector of customs in the port of London. Because of
Chaucer’s very close connection to John of Gaunt and the Lancastrians, the king would have kept a wary eye on him. He did not offer Chaucer further royal patronage beyond what Duke John had proffered.

  Chaucer was the son of a middle-class wine merchant. He did not attend university and was largely self-educated, and profoundly so, in Latin classics and French and Italian Romantic and Humanistic literature. We know little of Chaucer’s life itself. Early in his career he was accused of rape by a woman of substantial family, and the case was settled out of court. Donald Howard, Chaucer’s biographer, believes the poet’s wife was possibly one of John of Gaunt’s mistresses; likely her sister was. On a diplomatic trip to northern Italy it is possible that Chaucer sought out and met the Florentine poet and classical scholar Petrarch. Other than that, we know that Chaucer spent plenty of time on missions to France during the Hundred Years War; the rest is obscure.

  Chaucer’s work proves that he was prolific in adapting French and Italian literature, including Boccaccio’s Decameron, pillaging its more lusty scenes. The famous Princeton University critic D. W. Robertson, Jr., argued vehemently in the 1950s that Chaucer was deeply committed to Augustinian theology. After a fashion he may have been, but Chaucer was not a didactic theologian. His Christianity was implicit in his literary work and his religious views were conventional, including fervent anti-Semitism, even though there were almost no Jews in England at this time.

  Chaucer was different from Richard II in his reaction to the Black Death. Chaucer was not torn by anxiety to countervail the pandemic’s consequences, as the king was. Unlike his contemporary William Langland in Piers Plowman, Chaucer ignores the plague.

  The Canterbury Tales is a work of what today would be called journalism, which accepts all the horrors, ironies, and complexities of social life and passes no ostentatious judgment on them. Chaucer the journalist gives us human interest stories of middle-class people, women as well as men, and persuasive three-dimensional profiles. He seeks to intrigue and amuse. He has come along in a world that has been crippled by a disaster but that struggles successfully to resume the rhythm of its daily life, its occupations and little pieties, its sexual tensions, its prejudices and assumptions. A social healing is occurring but Chaucer does not reflect on this process: He illustrates its happenings.