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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey, we’re calling this episode The Black Death.
But before we dive in, I want to give you something to chat about at your cocktail party.
I mean, your next cocktail party.
Because that’s what this show is really about, right?
To give you weird stuff to say at fancy cocktail parties?
Wink emoji.
Right.
So, no one who lived through the Black Death called it that.
In the 1300s, it would have been called the Pestilence, the Great Mortality, or perhaps the Great Death.
As we will learn in the following interview, this is not a disease lost to history.
It’s alive and well, unlike the people who are unfortunate enough to catch it.
Now, don’t be too afraid.
Modern mortality rates are far lower for a variety of reasons, but it’s still a very serious illness.
Black Death first shows up in print 200 years after that first big outbreak.
It’s Svartadoden in Swedish chronicles in the 1500s, and in Danish it appears as Densortadoth around 1600.
But why was it called the Black Death?
This is the little mystery I got hooked on when writing this intro, and I’m so glad I checked because I found a really cool monster hiding in the etymology.
All right.
Historians of the plague lean towards this being a kind of translation error.
The Latin atra mors uses atra, which means both black and dreadful or terrible.
And the idea here is that the metaphorical terrible death got flattened into its quite literal colorful meaning.
Meanwhile…
controversy looms for the etymology crowd, because if you check the Oxford English Dictionary, as one does, you’ll find the OED asserts the terminology comes from the victim’s skin turning black.
Modern medicine tells us that the dark coloring of the skin can be caused either by necrotic flesh or from what is called disseminated intravascular coagulation.
Check the show notes if you want to learn more about how this disease absolutely overwhelms a human’s defenses.
Now, I’m slowly working my way through an online course on the colorful life of words.
And dictionaries may seem like cozy repositories for interesting snapshots of a word’s meaning.
But let me tell you, folks, dictionaries are battlegrounds.
Don’t let the pince-nez glasses and the tweed blazers fool you.
Anyway, I’m inclined to believe the translation hypothesis, the one that vectors from Latin metaphorically to English literally.
But while researching this introduction, this is where I got a really cool surprise.
Now, the earliest use of the English phrase black death that the OED can find anywhere is from 1755.
It sits on page 24 of an English translation by a man named Berthelsen.
He was translating a Danish bishop’s book, rendering the Danish phrase Sortaduth into Black Death for what is currently the oldest such usage in print.
The bishop who wrote this book is named Erik Pontapaden.
The book is The Natural History of Norway.
You have heard from this book before, even if you don’t remember it.
Trust me on this, because The Natural History of Norway turns out to be one of the founding documents of modern kraken lore.
In the book, Pontapadan argues for the sea serpent, the mermaid, and an octopus of monstrous size with a reputation for pulling ships under.
A century later, Herman Melville wrote a pretty famous book about a whaling crew whose captain gets somewhat obsessed with finding a very particular whale.
In fact, a whale who might be characterized as the White Death.
In chapter 59 of Moby Dick, the Pequod finds what Melville describes as
A vast pulpy mass furlongs in length and breadth of a glancing cream-collar lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its center and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.
After it sinks back into the sea, our narrator Ishmael comments, There seems to be some ground to imagine that the great kraken of Bishop Pontapadan may ultimately resolve itself into squid.
So how about that?
The term that modern English speakers use to describe the Great Plague, the Black Death, and the first print assertion associating the legendary Kraken with a real but mysterious enormous cephalopod species come from the same book.
Now, to be pedantic, it’s Pontapadan’s text as translated to English by Berthelsen.
I don’t want to leave that out or someone might, well, actually, use so hard that at your cocktail party you have to go hide behind the charcuterie board in embarrassment.
And I don’t have to tell you how these fancy cocktail parties can go, right?
Also, Herman Melville was writing from his personal experience on a whaling ship.
And at almost the exact same time, Iapetus Stamestrup was writing up the Kraken in scientific papers and would later name these tentacular giants Architeuthis, just six years later.
All right, you go on, mingle, have some hors d’oeuvres.
I’ve got to go join Karen and our guest, Dr. Benjamin Dodds, for some Monster Talk.
We’re bringing on Dr. Benjamin Dodds, Ben, to talk about the Black Death.
And it’s one of those topics that I’ve been interested in for a very long time, since my university days.
And it just feels like everybody knows the stories, but then the more you dig into it, the more complicated and surprising it all becomes too.
And I think it’s fascinating that we’re still learning new things about the pandemic and how people experienced it and drawing parallels to COVID and things that happened to us today.
So I thought that Ben would be…
the ideal guest to come on and help us unpack the history and also some of the myths.
Yeah, there might be some misconceptions out there.
Yeah, just a few.
So welcome to the show, Ben.
Indeed.
So I understand that your work is on cultural memory and you research the Black Death and Spanish history too and interweaving with cultural memory, how we remember and how we misremember in popular culture.
So this is right up our alley and that of our listeners.
Could you tell us just a little bit about your work and what you do?
Yeah, I really first started working on the Black Death when I was working on peasant agriculture and peasant economy in England.
So it was using medieval sources rather than modern sources and memory.
And I was looking at the way in which peasant societies managed to turn themselves around and come back from the impact of the Black Death, from the very high mortality and, you know, what effect it had on their economic life.
And then later on, I became interested in the cultural memory aspects.
That was largely because I was very fortunate to teach classes on the Black Death for many years and work with lots of students on this.
And the students were often interested in, you know, the movies and the novels and so on that emerged from the or that represented the Black Death.
So I tried to, you know, try to have a little think about that and look at the Black Death from that different modern perspective.
So you’re using the past to learn about the peasant tents.
That’s right.
Yeah, I’ve never thought of it like that, but that is true.
I always make the assumption that people do know about the Black Death.
I mean, it’s such a… What is the word?
Synecdoche.
Like, it really sort of wraps up a whole lot in a tiny set of words.
But what is the Black Death?
How long of a period are we talking about?
You know, how long did it take to sweep Europe and…
You know, basically, what are the basics?
And from there, we’ll dive in a little deeper.
I mean, the Black Death is a major pandemic that arrives in Europe in 1347, spreads across Europe into the early 1350s, also affected parts of Africa and affected very large parts of Asia, probably going back significantly earlier, perhaps even into the 13th century, some scholars have thought recently.
That’s the sort of Asian part of the pandemic that it moves gradually westwards into Western Europe.
So it lasted a few months in each individual place that it went to visiting this sort of awful mortality on pretty much every community that we know about.
Our evidence is mostly from Europe, although people are working much more on evidence from Asia nowadays.
So that’s an exciting aspect of the work that’s being done.
And it’s an outbreak of bubonic plague, which is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.
And the Black Death is often used as a sort of coverall term to describe all plague outbreaks in the past.
But strictly speaking, the Black Death is the one in the 1340s, which are very important because the Black Death comes to Europe in the 1340s after being absent for several centuries and then keeps coming back again repeatedly every few years.
That is to say, outbreaks of high mortality plague.
based mortality right through into the 17th and 18th centuries in European countries at least.
So it’s the beginning of this long phase of high disease related mortality.
You’ve reminded me that years ago I grew up in Australia and I went to a place in the northern beaches.
It’s called the quarantine station.
So it was a place where they would people who would come in on boats would have to stay there for a period of 40 days if they had scarlet fever or some kind of interest, some kind of.
infection or disease just to kind of contain it, not bring it into the general population.
And they had these kind of log books there showing the people who’d come through and what kinds of illnesses they had.
And I was astonished to see cases of the Black Death then.
And so that was back in the 1800s in Australia.
And I’ve heard that there are still some cases around today.
Is that true?
Yeah, you get it’s usually framed in terms of three major global pandemics that we know about in documented history.
So one in the sixth century that’s sometimes called Justinian’s Plague.
Then the 14th century one, which is obviously the Black Death that, you know, continued renewed outbreaks after that.
And then there’s a third pandemic as well that emerges in the Far East in the late 19th century.
And then.
That’s the one that has a really devastating outbreak, especially in the Indian subcontinent, with millions of people dying then into the early years of the 20th century.
But as you as you say, Karen, I know absolutely that you get isolated cases of bubonic plague today when people have been in contact with infected animals in the southern and western United States, for example, in the mountains and, you know, in other parts of the world to Central Asia and so on.
Very shocking.
And I’d like to ask about how many people it actually affected too, because when I was at university, we learnt that it could have been anything from maybe a third to a half of the population of Europe that died from the bubonic plague.
And now I’m hearing that the statistic is more maybe around 60%.
Can you clarify?
what the accepted figure is today?
Yeah, I think that’s right.
Something like, if we take their sort of population of Europe as a whole, something like 50%, maybe even higher.
It’s difficult to get precise data on the mortality because we do know about some individual communities, monasteries, for example, or groups of, there’s groups of notaries in one city that we know about, but they tend to be adult males.
And some people have suggested that children and elderly folk might have been even more vulnerable than they are.
So, you know, sort of push up the figures that we’ve got from the known communities a little bit more.
But something around 50 percent in total, although there’s a lot of evidence of how much the.
the impact varied from one community to the next.
So there’s a really fantastic study of North East England and lots of small isolated villages which were quite close to each other.
Some of those villages experienced the death of 80% of their tenants, some 20% of their tenants, even if they’re just a few miles apart.
So a lot of local variation.
But yeah, really, really high overall mortality.
That’s pretty difficult to imagine, you know, given what we went through with the sort of fear and awfulness of COVID and the mortality rate there was much, much lower, obviously.
So it’s difficult to really, I don’t know, compute that kind of death on that sort of scale.
I think the only comparable and possibly even worse case of disease-related mortality was in…
indigenous communities in the Americas, and some of them, at least after their first contact with Europeans, where people’s immune systems weren’t used to the diseases that the Europeans were bringing with them.
So we see sort of awful 90% mortality of, you know, people there, and huge overall mortality over
in the Americas as a result of that contact with the Europeans.
So, you know, I think those are two comparable events within recorded history.
I think in prehistory there may well have been ones too that archaeologists are sort of turning up with this devastating high mortality.
Yeah.
People know this as words, but…
There’s a very visceral side to this besides stacks of corpses.
There’s the whole symptoms of the disease itself.
And I remember even from high school, you know, and, you know, in American high school, this is a very small segment of a history class.
Right.
But.
The descriptions of what happens to you if you get this are pretty astonishing.
And the buboes, you know, I guess I suppose that means your body is dealing with so much infection.
It just blows out your armpits and swells.
But lymph glands are just like you’re just overwhelmed with infection.
But what is it?
that kills people?
Do we know?
I mean, like the disease sticks around for a long time.
And I know we get some level of immunity in the surviving generations, but this disease is astonishingly brutal during these high mortality times.
Can you talk, I’d like to two things.
What are the symptoms?
I guess really three things.
What kills you?
And then I’m really curious as to how do we know?
Like, what are the historical vectors and archaeological vectors?
Like, how do we know what happened?
These are really hard questions, these, and really difficult to get at.
But in terms of symptoms, I think that’s right, that the body is overwhelmed by bacterial infection, hence the buboes in some cases.
You get blackening of the skin too, sort of blotches appearing on people’s skin.
Often this culminates in a sort of really severe chest infection, so people are coughing up blood and so on.
You run an extremely high fever.
You die very quickly, often within two or three days, in some cases within weeks.
24 hours if the um if the the bacteria enter the bloodstream very quickly then you know septicemic version of a plague you can die you know die even more quickly than that so people are dying um you know very rapidly in a very visible horrible way that involves a lot of a lot of pain and suffering um i think that the question of immunity is a really intriguing one because
normally people don’t really have immunity to bacterial infections.
You might have a portion of the population that’s immune to particular viruses, but Black Death is bacteria.
Good point.
And yet it does seem that when we get detailed evidence on particular populations, it does seem to suggest that those who survived the Black Death were more likely to survive subsequent outbreaks of plague in the 1360s and 1370s and so on.
And so you get this odd skewing of the population pyramid by the late 14th century because
And generations of children are taken out, well, not entirely taken out, but severely sort of depleted by these repeated outbreaks of plague that affects them more than the adults, because they were the ones who hadn’t survived a previous outbreak.
So you get a sort of ageing population pyramid.
in the places that we know a lot about.
So it’s a kind of curious situation, something we don’t fully understand.
We know about the nature of the infection, but only because of recent work.
There was a really long standing debate on whether the Black Death was caused by
plague at all whether it was caused by Yersinia pestis at all and whether it could have been something different which has been in large part resolved just in recent years because scientists have been able to do much more with ancient DNA found in the burials of plague victims and they’ve been able to identify the DNA of the bacteria that were in their bloodstreams demonstrating that you know that was pretty much likely to have been the cause of the bubonic plague so it’s a major sort of advance and discovery.
um but then that throws up another problem which is when you have modern bubonic plague outbreaks they spread slowly and they’re quite difficult to catch because it’s a it’s a rat-based disease that needs to be transmitted from the rats to the humans by rat fleas so all the rats die because they’re suffering from the disease the fleas have nothing to feed from so they’re then forced to feed from humans therefore passing the disease to the humans quite a slow sort of process
Whereas medieval people are very clear that whatever the Black Death was or the form of plague or whatever can be passed from person to person in a really sort of rapid way, you know, much in the same way as, you know, we know that COVID could be passed from person to person.
So we’re not quite clear on what the mechanism for that was.
Droplet infection, possibly, but…
I mean, obviously, I’m not a doctor, but apparently the bacteria are quite large, so it’s difficult to catch plague from droplet infection.
It’s not sort of aerosolized in the same way as COVID is, for instance.
Some people think it could have been human body lice, which obviously people carry much more in the Middle Ages, and they carry disease like typhus and so on.
So maybe they were involved in plague infections.
Other mammals, besides rats as well, possibly, so the other carriers.
So there’s a lot of interesting scientific work on this and, you know, unresolved mysteries about…
quite why the Black Death is so devastating and spread so quickly.
Yes, speaking of culprits, I’ve heard that some people have been pointing the finger at marmots.
Is that true?
Yeah, you can get some quite plausible sort of scenarios where you have the early 14th century’s period of very rapid changing climate, where there’s cooling of the climate in the 14th century, which obviously affects the behaviour of animals and insects associated with those animals, because they sort of move if you’ve got changes in temperature, precipitation and so on.
So you could have a scenario where animals that aren’t coming into contact with humans very much,
start to come into contact with humans much more, transmitting diseases to humans.
But it’s one of those things that it’s easy to come up with sort of hypotheses about what might have happened, but really difficult to actually prove because we really need to know the history of marmots and rats and so on.
And it’s very difficult to unpick from the archaeological record because they’re very small bones and the people don’t necessarily look for them.
Obviously, documentary records are kind of problematic because it depends what people are noticing and what they choose to write down.
So, yeah, there are all sorts of really interesting cases or possible scenarios for the transmission of that disease from animals to humans in the first place.
And as a clarification point, this is marmites, not marmite and not Vegemite, right?
Absolutely.
They’re to blame for other things.
But I mean, to me, it’s fascinating that.
these questions are still there.
And of course they’re still with us now because.
even though the disease theory of medicine, I believe, is pretty widely accepted, there’s still people who resist it.
And that is present back then and has debate at an academic level.
And then now it has debate as sort of an epistemological level, which is very different.
But that resistance to the idea that…
disease comes from bacteria or virus is still out there.
And I just, I worry sometimes because I’m fascinated by these debates and these efforts to try to, you know, narrow down what is the actual cause.
But at the same time, the uncertainty inherent in science, where we’re always looking at provisional truths, is seen as a weakness by people who don’t want science at all and want to reject it.
I want these discussions.
I want these debates.
But at the same time, I am always afraid that having them is just fuel for the people who want to reject the entire system.
I agree.
And I think the Black Death is a really good case in point.
And, you know, I guess we might come to this in terms of sort of myths and memories and so on.
But the Black Death is the ultimate sort of medieval thing, isn’t it?
That this demonstrates how horrible the Middle Ages were, how dirty they were, how supposedly ignorant people were and so on.
And, you know, like the Monty Python, bring out your dead sketch and so on.
This representation of people in the past as hopelessly superstitious and helpless in the face of things like this.
And I think that…
That sort of image of people in the Middle Ages is really undermined by what you’re saying, Blake, because as you point out, we don’t really fully understand what was going on now from our perspective with all our supposed additional knowledge and so on.
And that raises the other question of the extent to which we would be able to cope with something like this now, because you can treat bubonic plague with strong antibiotics.
But if you had so many people becoming infected so quickly.
You know, it would be a whole big deal trying to get enough of those antibiotics produced and supplied to people.
You know, we know already from the vaccine situation during COVID-19 how difficult this sort of stuff is when you have something on a very large scale.
So I think that we’re probably not quite as safe from something like the Black Death as we might be inclined to think that we are.
But we have an understanding.
The Black Death has the advantage that if it takes a while to produce the medicine, the number of people who need it is drastically reduced very quickly.
And the same applies to people getting that medicine, right?
If you’re dying so quickly, it’s too late, right?
Isn’t it?
Before anything happens.
It is.
That’s very dark humor, but true.
Malthusian reckoning.
So Ben, how much do we know, actually know about how ordinary people experienced the plague?
And what are some of the biggest misconceptions that were around at that time?
I mean, I think we know quite a lot about how people experience the play because we’ve got a lot of written records from, you know, from Europe and other places, too.
So we’ve got eyewitness accounts.
We’ve got lots of, you know, really gruesome descriptions.
How far that translates to what ordinary people experience, though, is much more problematic because obviously most people can’t read and write in the Middle Ages and they’re not leaving firsthand accounts of what they experienced.
um that said we can get at their experience often from administrative records and that kind of thing which record um you know what happens in agricultural communities there’s some really interesting work being done by a historian called alex brown has a team of researchers at durham university at the moment where they uncovered
in records of payments to workers, people at the time of the Black Death who weren’t able to work as sort of medieval sick leave, which sort of reveals the Black Death not just as a mortality event, but also as a sickness event that people are just unwell and sort of taken out of action for a while.
So we can get this sort of roundabout picture from those records that they’re not very appealing on the surface, right?
Because they’re,
sort of administrative and it’s all about money and payments and this, that and the other.
But historians have been able to use those to give clues about ordinary people’s experience.
I think in terms of misconceptions, I think one of the main ones is that medieval people were so helpless in the face of the Black Death that they sort of panicked and behaved in irrational ways, threw up their arms and just sort of went crazy, basically, which I think is…
Really a long way from the truth, because I think people in the Middle Ages, first of all, thought that they understood what was going on, that there was a, you know, Blake, you were talking about this.
There was medical science in the Middle Ages and it wasn’t medical science as we think of it.
But they scientists thought that they were able to explain the Black Death and they debated it and had different possible explanations for it.
But they thought that they had the tools to understand what was happening.
Then obviously a lot of people saw the Black Death in terms of a kind of biblical punishment, you know, which made a lot of sense if you’d heard a lot of Bible stories and so on.
This was the sort of thing that God might do to punish sinful humans.
And so they’re able to make sense of the experience, possibly in a way that we wouldn’t really be able to today, that most people wouldn’t.
see frame things in those terms but to them this was entirely logical this is the sort of thing that god had to do in order to warn human beings to behave themselves better um so we see stuff like this extreme penitence you know that people whipping themselves and so on which looks to us like people going crazy in the face of the black death but is actually quite a rational response in terms of their understanding of what was going on to try and allay the you know the suffering that they were experiencing
So I think it obviously varies from person to person, group to group.
But a lot of medieval people responded in a pretty rational and sensible way to the awful situation they were facing.
They’re also pragmatic, too.
You know, the economy didn’t collapse.
People went out and sowed the fields and harvested the grain and so on because they had no choice.
If they didn’t do that, they were going to die of something else.
Right.
If the Black Death didn’t get them.
So you get this kind of continuity in the face of a disaster that’s pretty unimaginable to us.
If you’re into statistics, this seems like an incredible opportunity to hypothesize many, many effects and let them play out.
I mean, I’m thinking here, like, for example, just you’ve got fewer people able to go out and sow the fields.
But also, you’ve got fewer people who will need to eat in the autumn, right?
So it is fascinating if you could detach yourself from the horrible humanity of the thing, like all the death and the pain and the suffering.
But just from a how do these things play out in economic models, in population models?
Wow, what a rich ecosystem for testing ideas.
But you mentioned that it’s a bacteria, not a virus, which means, I think, as you were saying or alluding to, someone could get this again and again.
The immunity might be, I guess if there’s a genetic level, it would be people who might have a better immune system for recovering.
Maybe that’s the vector.
Who knows?
Or the angle, the advantage.
But golly, you could get this every season if it comes back.
No, thanks.
Yeah.
I think that’s right.
There’s some really good evidence for that from cemeteries, too, when people have looked at the bones of people who died in the Black Death because there was a huge famine in the 1310s.
And one of the arguments is that the impact of that famine on children was so severe that it permanently weakened them.
for the rest of their life so you know folk who are adults at the time of the Black Death had gone through this sort of traumatic deprivation of you know dietary deficiencies and so on in their childhood years and that made them much more vulnerable to the Black Death when it came along so without that it’s not that there wouldn’t have been a Black Death but that the effects of it were exacerbated by those long-standing deficiencies which I think that archaeologists can tell when they look at people’s
look at the evidence of bones because bone structure is changed by those kinds of deficiencies.
But then, as you say, you get the opposite scenario, right?
Because after the Black Death, there’s suddenly an abundance of land and far fewer people who are using that land to survive.
So you get this sort of ironic situation where people have gone through what must have been truly traumatic and yet find themselves in a much better position afterwards where they’re able to acquire land cheaply.
They’re able to work for people for much higher wages than they have been before.
And it’s almost overnight.
There’s a sudden improvement in the aftermath of the Black Death that must have been really noticeable.
I mean, all our source material comes from elites and they don’t like this, right?
Because they don’t want to have to pay workers more money.
They don’t think the poor should be going around behaving like the rich.
So they talk about…
You know, poor folk going around wearing coats that are lined with fur and drinking from, you know, nice sort of cups and going to the pub instead of working in the fields because wages were high.
So they had to work less and so on.
So that’s the elites getting cross about something which must have been great for most people.
The plague dividend, right?
Absolutely.
So, Ben, you mentioned the explanations and that some people viewed this as a punishment from God.
And even though there wasn’t medical science as we understand it today, what were some of the explanations that people came up with that medical people of the time thought might be underpinning this disease?
Well, they have no understanding in the Middle Ages, obviously, of microscopic pathogens in the human body that are causing disease.
And they frame disease instead in terms of the balance of humours in our body.
So each person’s body is made up of this set of humours.
And when you are ill, that’s because those different components, black bile, yellow bile and so on, are out of sync.
um so when medieval people talked about someone’s complexion that meant their overall balance of humors that defined their personality so you might be phlegmatic or choleric or sanguine which is defined by your natural balance of humors but then when someone’s someone gets some kind of disease that balance is thrown out
And that’s what causes the disease.
So there is no doubt that the Black Death is caused by some kind of humoral imbalance like every other disease.
But the debate between scientists is what causes the humoral imbalance.
And one of the you know, one of the main explanations is astrology.
So people are thinking about the movements of the planets across the backdrop of the stars in the sky and.
One of the things that determines people’s humours is the way in the arrangement of the planets as they sort of cross each other’s paths and so on, you know, within the signs of the zodiac and all the stuff that we think about in connection with astrology today.
So this is at the heart of medieval science, very much the sort of thing that university professors and so on would be debating.
And they decide that there were these astrological events which probably caused various things to happen to people’s humours.
And they grapple with all the same sort of stuff we would do, right?
If this is to do with the stars, then why do some people get sick and other people don’t get sick?
Why are some communities affected worse than other communities and so on?
So there’s this whole kind of scientific debate.
Other people say, oh, it’s not to do with that.
It’s to do with some kind of…
The emergence of gases from the centre of the earth, which creates this sort of miasma and that sort of wafts across and people are breathing it in and that causes humoral imbalance and so on.
So there are all these competing explanations, very much like there is when we get a modern, you know, modern disease.
When Covid came along, there were all these different explanations, weren’t there?
Was this something that was transmitted to humans in a…
you know, a fish market in China somewhere?
Was this something that escaped from a laboratory?
Whatever it might be.
The same kind of process of scientific debate amongst medieval scientists.
That, I think, raises the question of blame.
We always like to blame things on groups or peoples or others.
So who…
Who did they blame the plague on?
Was it like, was it your enemy neighbors?
Was it a religious group?
Outsiders.
Outsiders.
Was it foreigners?
Yeah.
Well, the most shocking and appalling, or one of the most shocking and appalling things at the time of the Black Death is the targeted violence towards Jewish people, because some people in the Middle Ages, especially prior to the arrival of the Black Death, think that this disease that they’re hearing about is caused by…
Jewish people and that causation can take different forms.
So some of it is a kind of conspiracy theory, this idea that Jewish people are deliberately poisoning wells, that Christians are then drinking from those wells and getting sick.
And there’s another sort of broad framework that people have where.
They’re living in communities with Christians and Jews together.
And people argue that that makes God angry because Christians weren’t meant to live with Jews.
And therefore, you know, that anger is expressed through plague and therefore the Jews need to be targeted and murdered.
I mean, the whole thing is really horrible and really appalling and also very problematic.
in terms of medieval explanations, because medieval people can see that Jewish people in their communities are dying of the Black Death as well as Christians.
So it’s obviously the conspiracy theory doesn’t really stand up very well.
But the evidence is really heartbreaking.
There’s a very famous case in a town, it’s not far from here, in Spain, in Catalonia, called Targa.
and we know from documentary evidence that there was an awful series of attacks and murders of jewish people in targa in 1348 associated with the black death and then in you know those documents obviously go back to the time period itself but then just a few years ago some jewish cemeteries were excavated in targa and they found the actual bones of those people who were murdered in those attacks
And the archaeological evidence was almost even more shocking than the documentary evidence, because you could tell that some of those victims were elderly folk who were obviously not able to escape from the pursuers and were murdered in the most brutal fashion.
So, you know, I talked before about how medieval people didn’t panic and so on at the time of the Black Death, but some of them certainly saw fit to perpetrate these awful acts of violence.
in a very illogical fashion that was obvious obvious to medieval people that you know that jews were vulnerable to although i guess before the arrival of the black death that might not have been so clear to them so they were taking they thought they were taking um preventative action but yeah it’s it’s a really really awful episode men women and children burned alive and all this sort of stuff that is unfortunate i mean it always is and i i i
It does seem like conspiracies that blame the Jews is like it’s the go to for Europe and America, apparently.
So, well, we have a lot of Europeans who migrated here.
I think we brought those terrible ideas with us.
But I just it’s kind of heartbreaking.
But I found it surprising that.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see a similar sort of scapegoating being applied to Islam or to Muslims.
So, but yet, you know, different…
They were newer, well, relatively newer.
Yeah, but I mean, they controlled…
Spain from, what, the 700s to the 14th?
It was a long period and certainly were well known.
And I know that there were also, but am I missing the boat there?
Were Islamic people, were Muslims, I should say Muslims, were Muslims being blamed at all or was it pretty much just Jewish people?
I mean, it’s targeted mostly at the Jews and it’s partly because there are more Christian communities throughout the rest of Europe where there are larger Jewish populations than there were Muslim populations.
Outside of the Iberian Peninsula, clearly, you know, Muslims were travelling into Northern Europe and so on, but there weren’t large communities of Muslims in
most European towns, whereas I don’t know about most, but many European towns had Jewish Jewish communities there.
There’s a whole sort of like theological aspect to this, too, because obviously Christians were blaming Jews for the murder of Christ.
And that gives a special sort of religious take there.
hatred of Jewish people in the Middle Ages was seemingly different from what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
It very much racialized, right?
The representation of the Jews as racially different and racially inferior led the Nazis to target them with that kind of pseudoscience.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t really a racial objection to the Jews so much as an objection to their religion, their religiosity, and the fact that it was intolerable
for Jews, for some medieval Christians, for Jews to exist in their communities because of that, you know, history of sort of killing Christ and not accepting Christ and so on.
And the blood libel was from the 1100s.
And so, I mean, the myth of the blood libel lasted for…
I mean, a long time from the 1100s to now.
And it all gets wrapped up into this sort of racialized stuff in the modern period.
But as you say, from the time of the Crusades and so on, you’re getting all these sort of myths and so on about the way that the Jews are behaving.
And it’s another conspiracy theory, isn’t it?
This idea that these people are powerful, they’re different from us, they’re doing nasty things, they want to target us, they want to get us and so on.
And I think that, you know, this is a…
a sad sort of take isn’t it on human nature but this is what human beings do in times of in times of crisis is try and find somebody to blame and then take out that frustration well we’re a very pro-science show here no matter what uh our current uh head of uh medical here in the united states says you would be surprised by just how wildly wrong he can be when he is spouting alarming official sounding statistics
We are 4.2% of the world’s population.
We buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth.
15% of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication.
When I was a kid, I always say this.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime.
Today, it’s one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
20 years ago, there was no diabetes in China.
Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
So here’s the thing.
All the numbers you just heard him say are bullshit.
Americans don’t buy 70% of the drugs on Earth.
We buy around 6%.
15% of American youth aren’t on ADHD meds.
Estimates put it closer to 5%.
One in three kids don’t have diabetes.
It’s actually 0.35%, or one in 285 kids.
And the rate of diabetes in China is roughly 12%, not, as I think you already know, 50%.
Half of all the people in China do not have diabetes.
I think that this sad period could come back at any moment, unfortunately.
But I guess it has.
It’s like I just it breaks my heart that it’s again, I keep coming back lately to the epistemological problem that people who don’t use.
science, evidence, logic, reason as their methodology for making their decisions are never going to agree with you when you have good evidence because that’s not how they’re making their decisions in the first place.
And it’s really problematic when you’re trying to actually get people to change their position.
So, yeah.
Ryan, your podcast is about monsters, isn’t it?
And this is the way in which people create monsters.
They monsterize.
Because they need them, don’t they?
They need the monsters in order to be able to explain the horrors that they’re enduring.
Well, and we’d love to say, well, you know, witches aren’t real, but aren’t they fun at Halloween?
Except witches…
may never have been real, but they’re always still a real threat to be accused of witchcraft.
You can still be murdered for being a witch.
You can still be in terrible jeopardy.
That’s the real fear.
Right.
It’s not about the cool, spooky story.
It’s about the horror of being accused.
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We have found a witch!
May we burn her?
Burn her!
that is very difficult to defend yourself against accusations that are based on magical thinking.
It’s just really, really hard.
So, yeah, we talk about this too.
We love monsters in the spooky sense, but the horrors are real right now and have always been.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Ben, earlier you were talking about your students and their exposure to pop culture about the Black Death.
Could you talk a little bit about how it’s been portrayed in books and movies and documentaries and even video games?
And is there any kind of depiction out there that you think gets it right or any that really gets it wrong?
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much, isn’t there?
And there’s so much really sort of good stuff.
It’s central to popular culture and the way that we think about, you know, what the Middle Ages were, the way that we distance ourselves from the Middle Ages, that we want to feel that we are modern and that we are protected against all this sort of stuff.
And they were medieval and so on.
And so it makes for a really good kind of story.
And the, you know, the most famous one, the Monty Python one with the bring out your dead sketches all over YouTube and so on.
Here’s one.
Ninepence.
I’m not dead.
What?
Nothing.
Here’s your ninepence.
I’m not dead.
Here.
He says he’s not dead.
Yes, he is.
I’m not.
He isn’t.
Well, he will be soon.
He’s very ill.
I’m getting better.
No, you’re not.
You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
We’re a long way from Monty Python, right, in chronology now, but, you know, folk love Monty Python and, you know, young people too are sort of enjoying it for the first time.
And I think it’s a particularly clever sketch, right, because it’s making fun of exactly this kind of misconception.
It’s making fun of the way that we represent medieval people as, you know, eating mud, hopelessly filthy, chucking people in plague carts before they’re even dead and so on.
And it’s actually a mockery of these assumptions that we make.
It’s, you know, a very smart piece of comedy on the part of Monty Python.
They were educated, yeah.
I think they were historians, yeah.
I think Michael Palin and Terry Jones were both historians.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they really knew what they were talking about when they were depicting that.
There are some great ones, though.
There’s a really good science fiction book by Connie Willis called Doomsday Book, which is part of a series that she wrote about.
A team of scholars at Oxford University devise a method of time travel and they send historians back to the past.
And they…
accidentally send some people back to the past in the time of the black death which you know some way sound doesn’t sound the most promising of sort of framing for a narrative but it’s the depiction of what it’s like at the time of the black death that i think is really good in that novel she really researched it and it brings home the awful personal tragedy of
the just being there in the mid 14th century at that time you know children wandering about the place because they’ve lost both their parents and all other family members and they just don’t know what to do it’s a desperate awful tragic situation um so you know within the framework of science fiction with very much sort of popular you know popular literature and so on there’s a really sort of engaging and detailed and historical representation of the black death
My own personal bugbear on this one, the one that really gets my goat, there’s a book by Ken Follett that’s the sequel.
He wrote Pillars of the Earth, which is a famous one about the construction of a cathedral.
And there’s a book, the big book that he wrote is a sequel called The World Without End, which should probably be called The Book Without End because it’s extremely long.
And there’s a very annoying representation of the Black Death there.
It goes through all of the sort of horrors of it and so on, which is sort of fine.
And some of it’s kind of documented.
But then he has this community where somebody comes in with these almost modern ideas that, like a modern person, they’ve looked around them and observed what’s happening.
So they encourage everybody to wear these face masks and
you know really reduces the mortality because they’re stopping the infection but then all the medieval people come along and say that’s got nothing to do with the transmission of disease and so on this is silly stop people wearing those face masks and it’s this sort of patronizing notion that if only medieval people behaved a bit more like us then they would have been just fine they just needed to be a little bit more modern um and they would have been okay look how superstitious and ignorant they were and they can’t really sort of cope with that
And I think that it’s really the opposite of getting to grips with the Middle Ages, that stuff, isn’t it?
That sort of very condescending attitude of we are superior, we are modern, they were stupid.
I mean, the book’s awful in lots of other ways, too.
It’s misogynistic and unpleasant representation of female characters and so on.
But the representation of the Black Death in that is the one that I dislike most.
Wow.
I’ll issue you that one.
Thank you so much for talking with us tonight.
Now, your book is called Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Thank you.
And this is so fascinating.
We could talk on and on about this.
I know you don’t have to come back.
There’s some areas that intersect with what we talk about.
But I want if you could leave our listeners with one surprising fact, it doesn’t have to be uplifting.
It’s up to you.
But just one surprising fact about the black that they they might not know because of all these misrepresentations.
What would that be?
I would go for what we were talking about earlier, about things getting so much better for so many people pretty quickly after the Black Death, because we think that it’s the ultimate doom and gloom, that it’s the end of everything, that it undermines society and so on.
And it obviously was in some ways, it’s horrible, but it didn’t undermine society.
And some people found themselves with lives that were rapidly much better in the aftermath.
Well, I say some people, a lot of people, right?
We’re talking about ordinary folk, peasants, you know, the less wealthy social groups.
Especially inheritance lawyers.
That is really interesting.
I think I heard that from…
James Burke, either in his Connection series or maybe in The Day the Universe Changed, he talked a little bit about that.
And the peasants?
Well, thanks to that loom way back and the fact that flax is cheap to grow, linen was their thing.
Well, it was everybody’s thing, really, in hats and shirts and bed sheets.
And especially if you take an indiscreet look up the nearest girl’s skirt.
underwear and just this once that’s the great historical trigger of change what you’re looking at now yes frilly knickers fascinating uh to see i again it’s hard to find an upside when there’s piles of corpses on the street but yeah there was some upside so yeah life keeps going on so
Yeah, Ben, to echo what Blake said, it’s just been great to talk with you, and I’m so fascinated by this topic.
So we’ve been around since 2009, and I’m astonished we haven’t talked about this before.
We’ve touched upon it, but it’s just been great to chat with you.
We’ve got one final question, though, that we ask all of our first-time guests.
It’s our signature question, and that is, what’s your favourite monster?
I was thinking about this one.
This is a great question to think about.
And I think mine is very definitely the Green Children of Woolpit.
You know the story from these.
Late 12th and 13th century, two chroniclers describe something happening in the mid 12th century where these two children with green tinned skin mysteriously appear in a village.
I won’t go on about it because I’m sure you know about this.
It’s a famous… We do, but our listeners may not.
Yeah, yeah.
if you want to summarize, that’s fine.
We’ve never done a whole episode about it, but it is one.
I love this story.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I no doubt there’s kind of prosaic explanation for this, but it really isn’t clear to me what that is, right.
That there’s been all these suggestions and they’re, you know, kind of plausible, but it’s really hard to ground them in the evidence.
And.
I don’t know, who knows what’s going on and what was going on.
And it’s really fun to speculate about what the possibilities are for where those children might have come from.
And interesting the way that this idea takes off so quickly as well.
Even in the early modern period, they’re already saying that these children fell from the moon or whatever it might be.
So it’s kind of connected to early science fiction too, that really fascinating story.
Indeed.
We’ll put some links in the show notes for that as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and for working in education.
The world needs this.
Yeah, for sure.
It’s been really great.
Well, thank you so much to you both.
It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Thank you for staying up for us.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, it was quite late.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Dr. Benjamin Dodds telling us about the Black Death, a disease which killed millions in Europe in the 1300s and which is still a pestilence humans deal with to this very day.
His book is Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and a link to it is in the show notes.
There are still fascinating mysteries being debated and studied about both the historical impact and mechanisms of this disease, as well as how human resistance and immune responses have changed over the centuries.
This is not a story merely of history, but one actively affecting people today.
And if you’re interested, perhaps your own research could one day help answer some of these questions.
As always, I hope that this discussion has inspired you to go learn more.
Check the show notes for some links to help your quest.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links at monstertalk.org forward slash support.
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On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot.
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