Status Updates From The Black Death (Manchester...

"The suffering was simply too great to take in: ‘It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupefied by seeing the pain.....Boccaccio noted that people in Florence stopped weeping at funerals and started cracking jokes instead – a phenomenon he seems to have regarded unsympathetically, although it is a common enough form of emotional self-defence."

"Not all contemporaries shared Gasquet’s views in detail, but there was widespread agreement that the plague had wrought a cataclysmic change, not only in society but within the individual. All the old certainties of the ‘high’ middle ages had been swept away: the feudal system collapsed; respect for social hierarchy and order was undermined; and the intellectual authorities of the past ceased to be believed."

"For many contemporaries the plague fitted easily into the chronology of the Last Days. Its horrors – along with the earthquakes and wars which had preceded it – were identified with the devastation which would follow the unleashing of Gog and Magog. William Dene of Rochester made the connection explicitly, and it is implicit in the biblical phrases used by other writers in their descriptions of the plague."