Carole Rawcliffe & Linda Clark 
The Fifteenth Century XII 
Society in an Age of Plague

Essays address plague and disease in the fifteenth century, as manifested throughout Europe.


Described as ‘a golden age of pathogens’, the long fifteenth century was notable for a series of international, national and regional epidemics that had a profound effect upon the fabric of society. The impact of pestilence upon the literary, religious, social and political life of men, women and children throughout Europe and beyond continues to excite lively debate among historians, as the ten papers presented in this volume confirm. They deal with theresponse of urban communities in England, France and Italy to matters of public health, governance and welfare, as well as addressing the reactions of the medical profession to successive outbreaks of disease, and of individuals to the omnipresence of death, while two, very different, essays examine the important, if sometimes controversial, contribution now being made by microbiologists to our understanding of the Black Death.


Contributors: J.L. Bolton, Elma Brenner, Samuel Cohn, John Henderson, Neil Murphy, Elizabeth Rutledge, Samantha Sagui, Karen Smyth, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Sheila Sweetinburgh.

Table of Content

Introduction – Carole Rawcliffe

Looking for
Yersinia Pestis: Scientists, Historians and the Black Death – Jim L Bolton

Pestilence and Poetry: John Lydgate’s
Danse Macabre – Karen Smyth

Pilgrimage in ‘an Age of Plague’: Seeking Canterbury’s ‘hooly blisful martir’ in 1420 and 1470 – Sheila Sweetinburgh

An Urban Environment: Norwich in the Fifteenth Century – Elizabeth Rutledge

Mid-Level Officials in Fifteenth-Century Norwich – Samantha Sagui

Leprosy and Public Health in Late Medieval Rouen – Elma Brenner

Plague Ordinances and the Management of Infectious Diseases in Northern French Towns, c.1450 – c.1560 – Neil Murphy

The Renaissance Invention of Quarantine – Jane Stevens Crawshaw

Coping with Epidemics in Renaissance Italy: Plague and the Great Pox – John Henderson

The Historian and the Laboratory: The Black Death Disease – Samuel K. Cohn

About the author

Sheila Sweetinburgh is a Principal Research Fellow in the Centre for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University and editor of Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220 (Boydell, 2016) and Later Medieval Kent, 1220-1540 (Boydell, 2018).