ARTH1913: Plague, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages

The bubonic plague of the Middle Ages—commonly known as the Black Death—took the lives of some two-hundred million people in Eurasia and Africa, making it the deadliest pandemic on record. Focusing on the plague’s peak in the fourteenth century, this seminar will engage art and material culture, as well as primary texts in translation, to study how the plague impacted daily life in the Middle Ages and affected cosmology, religious practices, and conceptions of death for centuries thereafter. The course will also engage methods and theories of environmental history and global history to better understand the scope of the pandemic. Students will learn how to analyze images, how to conduct research with historical sources, and will gain academic reading skills. We will also consider what the Middle Ages has to do with the modern era.

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