2 The Language of Plague and its Regional Perspectives: The Case of Medieval Germany

Abstract

“In the year of our Lord 1350 the greatest mortality of mankind, called the epidemia, ruled in the world so that the number of living men was insufficient to bury the others,” noted the chronicler Florence of Wevelinghoven in the middle of the fourteenth century.1 An eyewitness of the Black Death, he later became bishop of Munster in Westphalia (1364–78) and bishop of Utrecht (1378–93).2 The Westphalian cleric was only one among many to describe in these or in very similar words the unimaginable mortality caused by the Black Death. Contemporary records from all over Europe tell the same story: the disease appeared everywhere in the world and depopulated the cities, leaving too few survivors to bury the countless dead.3 It is this image of a “worldwide” pandemic of the Black Death, together with, to a lesser extent, descriptions of the subsequent outbreaks of plague by contemporaries, which has dominated the historian's view of medieval epidemics until today. But what one may call the language of plague, the language of the sources, comprises universal and particular aspects at the same time. As European society is not uniform (despite all attempts of the administration of the European Union) and has never been so in the past, one has to ask how far did the different geographical and cultural backgrounds of chroniclers and medical practitioners influence the language of plague? Are there any differences in the attitudes towards the disease and in the ways of dealing with medieval epidemics, even if the same words are used? Did an Italian really have exactly the same view of plague as a Spaniard, an Englishman or a German? What finally inspired me to ask these questions within the context of plague were several examples of such differences in sources of the period concerning another medical problem, the disease (or rather the diseases) contemporaries used to identify as leprosy.