Flawed image of Black Death emerged in 1800s
The German medical historian Justus Hecker, who died in 1850, and his followers wrote about the Black Death in a dark, gloomy, emotional tone. They emphasized its morbid and bizarre aspects, such as violent anti-Jewish pogroms and the itinerant Flagellants who whipped themselves in public displays of penance. In their 19th-century writing of the Black Death, it was cast as a singular event of cataclysmic proportions — a foreign, peculiar, almost wondrous entity that did not belong to European history.
As it is remembered today, the dominant symbols of the Black Death – like images of uncanny dancing skeletons and the Grim Reaper – are products of that Gothic imagination. Ironically, the iconic plague doctor was not a medieval phenomenon but a 17th-century introduction. It was only then – 300 years post-Black Death – that doctors treating plague patients started wearing special full-body outfits and a beaked mask, a precursor of modern personal protective equipment. So, sadly, my own plague doctor Halloween costume has nothing to do with the Black Death pandemic itself.
Even the term Black Death is a 19th-century invention; none of the medieval witnesses wrote of a “Black Death” or thought of plague as black.
The living legacy of this Gothic epidemiology still defines scholarly and popular understanding of plague and may creep into today’s Halloween costumes and decorations.
Triumph of death or celebration of life?
Pandemics never mean death and suffering for all. There is strong evidence that Black Death survivors experienced better living standards and increased prosperity. Even during subsequent outbreaks, differences in class, location and gender informed people’s experiences. The urban poor died in greater numbers, for example, as the well-off fled to their countryside residences. Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous “Decameron,” written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, tells the story of 10 young people who took refuge in the countryside, passing their days telling each other entertaining stories as a way to forget the horrors of plague and imminent death.
A later example is Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who took refuge in the Princes’ Islands off the coast of Istanbul during a plague outbreak in 1561. His memoir describes how he spent his days fishing and enjoying other pleasant pastimes, even while the daily death toll in the city surpassed 1,000 for months.
Countless narratives testify that recurrent outbreaks of plague inspired people to find new ways to embrace life and death. For some, this meant turning toward religion: prayer, fasting and processions. For others, it meant excessive drinking, partying and illicit sex. For still others, self-isolation and finding comfort in one’s own company did the trick.
No one yet knows how the COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered. But for the moment, Halloween is the perfect occasion to play with the pandemic lesson to simultaneously celebrate life and contemplate death.
As you dress up in spooky costumes or decorate your home with plastic skeletons to celebrate this late capitalist holiday – yes, Halloween is now a thriving US$10 billion industry annually – you may find comfort thinking about how the way you feel about life and death connects you to those who survived past pandemics.