The Great Mortality: An intimate history of the Black Death, by John Kelly

"Late medieval man not only expected to die, he expected to die hard and ugly."

Harry: Do you think about death?

Sally: Yes.

Harry: Sure you do. A fleeting thought that drifts in and out of the transom of your mind. I spend hours, I spend days.

Memento mori are reminders that you are going to die. In the old times you had to carve a skull out of wood or stone, or, alternatively, use an actual skull. Today they are easier to produce. Mine are delivered through the very best twitter account, daily death reminder. Its tweets nudge me offline, and into the lush garden of Good Things on this Earth. But they also suffer from mission creep. After unmasking social media as empty and worthless, they sometimes, in their enthusiasm, proceed to drain the meaning from everything else. If we are all ashes in the end, what is the point?

But really, a small, somewhat blank-looking grim reaper on a computer screen is nothing. People have, at various points in the past, lived knee-deep in death. How did they do it? I read John Kelly’s book to find out.

The book is half study of the plague, half tour of Medieval Europe. Some chapters fall into a pattern: “look what these crazy Medievals got up to! Then the plague came.” But the through-line you’re looking for, the story of what the plague did and of what people did when it came, is there.

Kelly puts the historical moment in perspective:

Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death [...] remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.

According to the [United States Atomic Energy Commission’s] Disaster and Recovery, a Cold War-era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, the Black Death comes closest to mimicking “nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset and scale of casualties.”

The scale of its casualties is staggering:

between 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains in front of Moscow, the continent [of Europe] lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants. But in parts of urban Italy, eastern England, and rural France, the loss of human life was far greater, ranging from 40 to 60 percent.

These unimaginable numbers cast a long shadow: