The book The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350 is a strong compilation of texts of the plague times. The documents John Aberth collected pieced together a narrative with several views. The section ‘The Artistic Response’ was the most interesting to me, and I was excited to find one of the prompts based on it. I believe that the most important plague-centric themes in the art of medieval society were the Dance of Death and worms. In my essay below, I hope to explain how these themes benefitted medieval society. Something important to note before describing the themes: in reading this book and the assigned readings for class, I cannot help but draw a certain conclusion about how medieval society viewed death. While death could be considered scary or unknown, it is an end that all people must face. As such, the victims of the Black Death seemed to treat dying in a more clinical matter than could be expected. This is not to say that these people were free of fear; in fact, I imagine a good many of them were terrified of the ‘after’, considering a common line of thought being that God was angry and punishing his people . However, this fear does not seem to stop the people from accepting this inevitability.
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There are many depictions of this in art since the late 14th century, but it did begin its life as a physical dance. There are various theories as to why dancing was popular during the plague. In ‘The Great Chronicle,’ monks from Saint-Denis reported that villagers were using dance and merriment as a way to ward off the oncoming plague . In a similar vein, Jean de Venette observed that “God of His accustomed goodness deigned to grant this grace, that however suddenly men died, almost all awaited death joyfully .” A third view considers that the dancing may have been a manifestation of muscle spasms (or in fact an attempt to cover them up
There are many depictions of this in art since the late 14th century, but it did begin its life as a physical dance. There are various theories as to why dancing was popular during the plague. In ‘The Great Chronicle,’ monks from Saint-Denis reported that villagers were using dance and merriment as a way to ward off the oncoming plague . In a similar vein, Jean de Venette observed that “God of His accustomed goodness deigned to grant this grace, that however suddenly men died, almost all awaited death joyfully .” A third view considers that the dancing may have been a manifestation of muscle spasms (or in fact an attempt to cover them up