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Organization of cities complicated
During the course of the pandemic, the cities and towns developed sophisticated mechanisms to prevent the epidemic disease from spreading and to minimize the damage it brought to the residents. The infected individuals and households were identified and isolated in special hospitals so that the contacts between the sick and the healthy were avoided. Accompanied by the regulations on the plague victims, cities also formulated Bills of Health and regulations for travelers and ships from exterior regions. Bans related to the movement of goods and travelers from the infected areas within the country were issued as well to reduce the possibility of the plague spread. The need to control the plague transmission facilitated the development of a more sophisticated administrative system and the enforcement of the state power on controlling the residents within its territory, which indicated state restrains on the mobility and liberty of people. The necessity for sanitation improvement also required cities to make more efforts in pure water supply, garbage disposal and food inspection. Driven by the need, the city administrative machines was advanced to implement the social control. (Clark, 2015: 162)
• Renaissance humanism
Though the Black Death did not directly result in the taking place of Renaissance, however, it led to a series of reforms that shook the foundations of Mediaeval Europe and paved its way to Renaissance. The idea of equality was permeated in heart of people.
Education
As more and more vacancies in Church were created due to the death of the previous clergymen, people with less education replaced the previous clergymen, changing the situation that education was blocked only to those who knows Latin and French. More and more informal languages were applied in education, allowing more plain people to access education. This revolutionary change shifted the function of education gradually from church to society, stimulating the founding of universities across Europe and providing the intellectual roots for the spreading of the ideas generated during Renaissance.
Ideology and Art
The rejection of mediaeval Latin was accompanied by the trend to restore Ancient Greek and Roman knowledge and Art. The threat of death that came from the influence of the Black Death made people focus more on the happiness and pleasure in secular life, driving philosophers at the time to pay more attention on human conditions.
The shadow brought by the Black Death created changes in the way people conceive the world and provoked people to change the traditional way of living their life taught by church. In this context, people gradually abandoned the idea of asceticism and pursued pleasure in life. Instead of imagine a world after death, the public realized that reality they were facing counted more.
During the course of the Black Death spread in Europe, more art works featured with themes on death, hell and fear appeared, expressing the desperation people were undergoing at the time. After the Black Death, the literatures and paintings were pervaded by a profound pessimism. (DesOrmeaux, 2007) Nevertheless, it brought positive effect to the unity of artists (Gardner, 2008) which helped to ensure the quality of art works in Renaissance.
The threat of the Black Death also made people realized everyone was equal in the eye of death regardless of their social status, watering the sprout of the idea of equality. The tension between the peasants/workers and landowners caused by the shortage of labor force and high wage for the peasants/workers also leads to Peasant Revolt that challenged the unequal power relationship between the landowners and the peasants/workers.
Conclusion
Although there are still controversies over the origin and the pathogen of the Black Death, the consequences of the Black Death seem to have more certainty. There are literature discussing its influence upon population, economy, politics and culture. As analyzed, the influence in different social realms interacted with each other. The drastic decline of the population caused a shortage of labor force, rising the wage for peasants/workers and making them more empowered in terms of bargaining for better working conditions and freedom from land. The feudalism based on the control over the bodies of peasants therefore collapsed due to a more balanced power relationship between peasants and landowners, which also provided economic foundation for the idea of equality advocated by renaissance.
The hierarchy was also undermined as the authority of Catholic Church was challenged by people who failed to obtain any proper treatment and cure from church. Clergies also died from the infection of the plague, leaving a number of vacancies in church later filled with the unqualified clergymen. The recruitment of the unqualified individuals led to the popularization of informal language in preaching and teaching, decentralizing the function of education from church to society and driving more universities to be built to cater public needs for education. This change provided intellectual foundation for renaissance and placed church to the position not able to enforce dominant control over secular life of people.
The Black Death also influenced the art in the period as amounts of them showed depression and fear toward death. The fear drove people to shift their attention from life after death to life at present, implying desire for pleasure, wealth and happiness in present life, especially when they realized that everyone was equal in front of death. Hence hierarchy and inequality were challenged by people who were taught to obey the hierarchy.
In conclusion, the Black Death though did not led to renaissance directly, it seemed to provide conditions to its occurrence and spread in various social realms.
REFERENCE
[Book]
1. Varlik, N. (2015). Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World. Cambridge University Press. P.90-127
2. Campbell, B. M. (2016). The Great Transition. Cambridge University Press. P.276
3. Clark, L., & Rawcliffe, C. (Eds.). (2013). The Fifteenth Century XII: Society in an Age of Plague (Vol. 12). Boydell Press. P.162
4. Palmer, R. C. (2000). English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law. Univ of North Carolina Press. P.19
[Journal]
5. Malanima, P. (2012). The economic consequences of the Black Death. na.
6. DesOrmeaux, A. L. (2007). The Black Death and its Effect on Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century Art (Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The School of Art by Anna L. DesOrmeaux BA, Louisiana State University).
7. Gardner, J. (2008). Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market Judith B. Steinhoff. Speculum, 83(3).
8. Olea, R. A., & Christakos, G. (2005). Duration of urban mortality for the 14th-century Black Death epidemic. Human biology, 291-303.
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