Fear and faith: coping with the Black Death

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. It's the second episode today of our Sunday series exploring the Black Death, and Emily Briffitt is joined once again by historian Thomas Asbridge, whose latest book is The Black Death A Global History to talk through this devastating pandemic. For those who lived through it, the Black Death was a reality marked by fear, loss and uncertainty. But how did people cope with such overwhelming catastrophe? And what can contemporary records reveal about the emotional experience of living through the plague?

I'm Emily Briffitz, and I'm joined by historian Thomas Asbridge. In this second episode, we'll be stepping into the medieval world at the height of the pandemic, exploring human stories of despair, faith, and survival. Last episode we spoke about the spread of the Black Death, and in this episode I'm hoping that we could really touch on the human side of it, the lived experience. Now, obviously, we've spoken a little bit about some of the devastation that was caused, some of the fear, the intrepidation.

But how close did societies actually come to breaking down? Yeah, for me, I would argue that that's perhaps the question I was most interested in when I started researching the Black Death. I think it's the thing that perhaps in the end maybe has the most to tell us when we look at the the broader history of this pandemic. in terms of lessons for the modern world? I think if we're going to try to m understand the degree to which society came to the precipice, if you like, then maybe there's three different things we might want to consider.

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