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From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349. It charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy. Focusing on England, an exceptionally well documented region, the book then offers a wide range of evidence for the plague's variegated repercussions on the economy and, no less complex, on social and religious conduct. It is concerned with the British experience of plague in the fourteenth century. Students of intellectual history will find a wealth of pseudo-scientific explanations of the plague ranging from astrological conjunctions, through earthquakes releasing toxic vapours, to well poisoning by Jews. From narrative accounts, often of heartrending immediacy, the book further proceeds to a variety of contemporary responses, drawn from many parts of Christian Europe. It then explains contemporary claims that the plague had been caused by human agency. The book attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind.
This chapter explores the variegated repercussions of the plague on the economy and, no less complex, on social and religious conduct.
religious conduct seem to converge in the notion of infidelity: unchaste Christian women are prone to becoming renegadas , infidels. But ideology intervenes as writers of fiction are loath to allow renegade women to stay permanently in Muslim lands. While the rest of the Spaniards in this novel die at each other’s hands in Tunis, Argelina alone survives and manages to return repentant to recover the religion and land of her birth, renouncing what she has become along with the pleasures and unbridled eroticism of orientalised frontier space. Argelina bears little
opportunity of being revenged on Priests and Universities’.3 It is quite clear then that amongst a variety of contemporaries in the 1690s (in Scotland, London and Oxford), Toland’s reputation was as a violent and controversial firebrand, incautious in his enmity to the institution of monarchy, and disreputable in his religious conduct and beliefs. Although intelligent and pretending to learning, the violent nature of his temper had betrayed him in ‘all places and countrys he has been in’.4 It was no surprise then that 93 93 MUP/Champion_05_Ch4 93 27/2/03, 10:20 am The
Rotunda’ relied heavily upon an account of her recent and dramatic break with Methodism. Her first lecture, reported in her journal the Isis, began with the declaration that ‘I have been full of superstition, but I trust that I have ceased to be so.’ 22 There had been nothing in Sharples’ previous religious conduct to suggest that she might soon be lost to infidelity. In fact she was among the most devoted members of her
I insisted on the importance of uniformity within the state, proclaiming that ‘Vnitie [is] the perfection of al things’. 60 In contrast to the prevalent arguments over religious truth and appropriate religious conduct, however, Donne argues that the unity of the Church cannot be contained in one earthly institution alone: it is to be found at the point where the State, the Church and the individual
danger that missionaries were in within the Cape Colonies, no missionary had been attacked, which Buxton took as a sign that their moral and religious conduct had protected them from the turmoil and violence between the settlers and Xhosa. Sir George Grey, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, was supportive of Buxton’s 1835 motion for a Select Committee although he acknowledged that the
source of ‘reflection’ and a ‘moral’ fiction designed to inculcate virtues in readers.7 Appearing in the same year, her anonymous Original Stories (1788), a collection of children’s tales accompanied by illustrations by William Blake, was greeted more enthusiastically. The Critical Review’s reviewer found it ‘highly proper’ in developing ‘moral virtues and religious conduct’ in the ‘youthful mind’.8 Original Stories saw six reprints before the end of the century, as well as a German translation. The Monthly Review’s reviewer guessed that it was written by the author of
and minhag with respect to the observance of mitzvot , the exact manner in which they are to be performed, and the rules that govern them. Men and women who maintained the halakhah out of the genuine and simple conviction that this was the way to worship God did so without paying attention to these distinctions, even if they were aware of them. The religious conduct of women was marked by