Trauma with a Silver Lining in the Middle Ages (article)

Pious bequests in hundreds of last wills and testaments in central and northern Italy from the mid-14^th to the early-15^th century chart a traumatic reliving of the Black Death of 1348 with its first recurrence in the early 1360s. In testaments from the nobility to the peasantry, nothing much changed with the Black Death, except that

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the number of wills and testaments skyrocketed. The patterns of bequests remained largely what they had been over the past 70 years or more. Regardless of the lives they lived, on their deathbeds, testators practiced what the mendicant preachers preached. Before and after 1348, citizens and peasants alike sought to dissociate themselves from their earthly attachments by ordering the executors of their estates to sell off great portions of their worldly holdings. The proceeds of these sales then were ordered to be distributed in small sums over a wide landscape of charitable beneficiaries, from individual walled-up hermits to large monasteries. In this way they prepared for the afterlife by blunting their obsessions with the ego, or, as Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-80) more zealously expressed it in a letter to Fra. Batolommeo Dominici in 1375, “I desire ‘to see you wholly consumed in the fire of His charity, for I know that this burns up all thought of self’” (Kenelm Foster and Mary Ronayne, eds., Selected Writings of St. Catherine of Siena, 1980, 67-8).

However, when plague returned in the 1360s, testamentary patterns changed abruptly. Now, testators stockpiled their pious offerings to leave instead only a few large bequests to secure their remembrance both before God and their fellow parishioners. This was done by commissioning objects to bear witness to their lives, such as painted beds for hospitals, bearing the testators’ coats of arms or a panel painting to adorn their place of burial. The testators demanded to be painted in their very likeness (ad similitudinem) at the feet of their selected patron saints.

Similarly, amongst the leading thinkers of the late Middle Ages, a parallel change in attitudes can be detected. The hundreds of letters to friends, patrons, and long-dead philosophers of antiquity, crafted by Francesco Petrarca, sketched in detail his philosophical and emotional autobiography. In 1348, he painted in dark hues the plague’s destruction, the dissolution of society physically and spiritually, and his near-total loss of friends and relatives. With other-worldly contempt, he decried his earthly “chains,” declaring that those who lost their lives to the plague were the lucky ones. With the return of plague in 1362, Petrarch’s passions turned abruptly. Now, in letters to Giovanni Boccaccio, Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia, and friends at Avignon, Petrarch saw earthly life as all too short; action in the present secular sphere suddenly was of essence, whether it involved the Holy Roman Emperor crossing the Alps to Italy to restore order or Boccaccio and himself increasing

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their scholarly output and ensuring that their libraries would be preserved to inspire and teach future generations.

Physicians too changed their minds. In the face of the Black Death in 1348, they suddenly found the cherished teachings of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, along with other doctors and philosophers, to have been utterly useless in the face of the Black Death. All that could be done was to turn to God for forgiveness. Yet with the plague’s return in the 1360s and successive ones into the 15^th century, physicians’ new genre of medical writing—the plague tract—multiplied rapidly in number and increasingly was written in the vernacular and for the laity. By the last decades of the 14^th century, these works exuded a new confidence—even hubris—as doctors claimed their skills and experimentation had cured or prevented the plague. A doctor at Padua toward the end of the 14^th century, for instance, proclaimed that his generation of physicians had gone beyond the ancients and even beyond nature itself.

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