With an estimated thirty-eight million men, women, and children left dead, the Black Death that swept through Europe in the mid-fourteenth century is by and large the most devastating epidemic of medieval European history. Long thought to have been brought to the European continent by flea-carrying Asian traders, the plague left a crippling trail of death and destruction in its wake. Some scholars now challenge the source of the plague, saying it could not have come from fleas or rats but rather a human-contact transmitted type of hemorrhagic fever. Nevertheless, these facts remain clear: the disease ravaged Europe for years, forever altering the economic, societal, medical, and religious landscape, likely changing the course of history itself,
