Cipolla Black Death Analysis

Those who lived through the fourteenth-century plague outbreak in Europe described their experiences in terms of horror, loss, and devastation. Gabriele de’Mussis spoke of those “… who enjoyed the world and upon whom pleasure and prosperity smiled, who mingled joys with follies, the same tomb receives you and you are handed over as food for worms. Oh hard death, impious death, bitter death, cruel death..,” while Francesco Petrarch asked “Will posterity believe these things, when we who have seen it can scarcely believe it, thinking it a dream except that we are awake and see these things with our own eyes, and when we know that what we bemoan is absolutely true…?” Although these are particularly striking reactions to the crisis, the reaction to the onset of plague in 1347 seems to have been remarkably uniform. Although reactions

Such a view limits the historian’s understanding of documents arising from the Black Death while simultaneously insulting the individuals that authored them. Fourteenth-century medical personnel and chroniclers engaged with descriptions, both their own and others’, of the Black Death to posit solutions that made sense within their cultural context. As subsequent waves of plague emerged in Europe, writers increasingly acknowledged ideas about contagion, natural causes, and preventative measures that reflect a turn to natural sciences. These theories held until the 1894 identification of Yersinia pestis (Y.pestis) by Alexandre Yersin, which was subsequently challenged, reaffirmed, and qualified by contemporary scholars. Modern scholars still struggle to pinpoint the exact etiology of the Black Death and, in the process, fall short of the perfect understanding expected from medieval