Note 297 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

It is an interesting problem how far the vast calamity of the Black Death (1348–49) told either for skepticism or for superstition in this age. In Boccaccio’s immortal book we see a few refined Florentines who flee the pest giving themselves up to literary amusement; but there is also mention of many who had taken to wild debauchery, and there are many evidences as to wild outbreaks of desperate licence all over Europe.297 On the other hand, many were driven by fear to religious practices;298 and in the immense destruction of life the Church acquired much new wealth. At the same time the multitudes of priests who died299 had as a rule to be replaced by ill-trained persons, where the problem was not solved by creating pluralities, the result being a general falling-off in the culture and the authority of the clergy.300 But there seems to have been little or no growth of such questioning as came later from the previously optimistic Voltaire after the earthquake of Lisbon; and the total effect of the immense reduction of population all over Europe seems to have been a lowering of the whole of the activities of life. Certainly the students of Paris in 1376 were surprisingly freethinking on scriptural points;301 but there is nothing to show that the great pestilence had set up any new movement of ethical thought. In some ways it grievously deepened bigotry, as in regard to the Jews, who were in many regions madly impeached as having caused the plague by poisoning the wells, and were then massacred in large numbers.