Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages

Ada Palmer · 4 Jun 2020

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The Renaissance and early modern period were not a better time to be alive than the Middle Ages they are said to have rescued Europe from.

Their wordsAs a Renaissance historian, I feel it’s my job to shoulder the other half of the load by talking about what the Renaissance was like, confirming that our Medievalists are right, it wasn’t a better time to live than the Middle Ages

Also said by Eleanor Janega

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A mass death does not by itself produce a boom afterwards: expecting a pandemic to renew an economy on its own misreads what followed the Black Death.

Their wordsUsing history to understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a period of growth and rising wages.
Our reading
The Renaissance and early modern period were not a better time to be alive than the Middle Ages they are said to have rescued Europe from.

Their wordsAs a Renaissance historian, I feel it’s my job to shoulder the other half of the load by talking about what the Renaissance was like, confirming that our Medievalists are right, it wasn’t a better time to live than the Middle Ages
Our reading
The golden-Renaissance myth damages our understanding of the Renaissance itself as badly as it damages our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Their wordswhile the myth of the golden Renaissance does terrible damage to how we understand the Middle Ages, it does just as much damage to how we understand the Renaissance.
Our reading
Life expectancy in Italy fell sharply between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from 35-40 years in the 1200s to 18 by 1500.

Their wordsIn Italy, average life expectancies in the solidly Medieval 1200s were 35-40, while by the year 1500 (definitely Renaissance) life expectancy in Italian city states had dropped to 18.
Our reading
The plague did not pass through in 1348 and leave: it stayed endemic in Europe for nearly four centuries afterwards.

Their wordsin school they talk as if the plague swept through in 1348 then went away, but the bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today, a fact of life.
Our reading
Plague receded from Europe through fourteen generations of natural selection, not through any advance in medicine.

Their wordswhen plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work

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