From Medievalists.net:
[The author], Ken Mondschein, is a history professor at UMass-Mt. Ida College, Anna Maria College, and Boston University, as well as a fencing master and jouster. Click here to visit his website.
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has sickened almost 86,000 and killed more than 2,900 people, spread worldwide, and caused stock markets to tumble. Analogies to the Black Death, the outbreak of bubonic plague that wiped out between one-half and two-thirds of the population of Europe from 1347–51, were inevitable. With this came the other connotations of the premodern past: New York Times reporter Donald McNeil advised “to take on the Coronavirus, go medieval on it.” It’s a bit of a disingenuous title: McNeil denounces those who want to “close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities” as medieval and inferior to using modern medicine, even as he admits that the measures have helped somewhat.So the question remains:
To be sure, there are some similarities. Like the Black Death, COVID-19 comes from the Far East and from animal-to-human transmission—in the first case, from rats; arguably from bats today. Like the Black Death, it is a far-reaching pandemic whose spread was enabled by globalism—the Mongol empire and Italian merchants trading on the Silk Road in the first; modern air travel and international markets in the second.
So, too, has the outbreak led to a shuttering of gates and a blaming of the “other.” In the Middle Ages, Jews were blamed for poisoning wells and lynched. Hundreds of Jewish communities were attacked, and many were destroyed. In the city of Strasbourg, several hundred Jews were burned alive in a wooden house specially built for the purpose. In Basel, Switzerland, 600 were burned at the stake and 140 children forcibly baptized.
Today, the race to close borders mirrors Donald Trump’s nativist, xenophobic anti-immigrant stance and provides grist for the mill of those who oppose him. McNeil, for instance, says, “travel restrictions can cause more panic, misery and death than they prevent…. Also, quarantines feed racism and stigma,” but that “for Mr. Trump, such a move is natural.” The medieval, representing the ignorant, tribal, and backwards, is again being used as a foil for the modern, enlightened, and internationalist. But even if we can recognize similar sentiments to medieval Jew-burning in the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim and anti-Latino policies, the president is implementing ideas only held by a percentage of the American population in a top-down fashion while, in contrast, medieval Christian authorities often sought to protect Jews against widespread popular anti-Semitism.
CORVID-19 itself is also very unlike bubonic plague, and not only because it is caused by a virus and not a bacterium. It spreads person-to person, whereas only one of the three forms of the Plague, the pneumonic, does so; the rest require bites from fleas. The mortality rate is quite different: around 3.3% of those infected for Coronavirus versus around 50% for untreated bubonic plague (infection of the lymph nodes with the yersinia pestis bacterium), and 100% for untreated pneumonic (respiratory) or septicemic (systemic infection) plague.
More importantly, while it was a tragic loss of life, the economic effects of the Black Death had overall positive effects for the surviving wage-laborers of medieval Europe. With a smaller population, there was more land, and more food, to go around. More importantly, landowners still needed the grain on which their wealth was based harvested....MORE
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