Eleanor Janega is a medieval historian at the London School of Economics.
Much to my amusement as a medieval historian, the Black Death is suddenly an everyday topic of conversation. That pandemic of the bubonic plague, which began in 1332 in eastern Asia and reached Crimea in 1347, spreading to the rest of Europe from there, seems to have entered public debate largely as an exhortation to good cheer during the covid-19 outbreak. The optimistic chirpily remind us that the Black Death was horrifying, obviously — it may have killed as much as half the population of Europe — but it also led directly to wonderful things including an increase in real wages and the Renaissance.
