I woke up this morning on, October the fifth in the year of our lord 2023, and was not a zombie. This is notable for reasons which will shortly become clear. Because I am not a zombie, this means that I had to get up and do my job. Unfortunately, as a part of said job, a thing that I have to deal with on a frustratingly regular basis is the fairly pervasive idea that medieval Europeans were somehow uniquely stupid. The foolish medieval person is usually proffered in comparison to the total brain genius who is making the statement, who is somehow simultaneously smarter than a medieval person, and yet hasn’t read a single book on medieval history or considered how to make any sort of social analysis at all.
Now, I will probably never be rid of these people. It is likely that I will go to my climate ravaged grave surrounded by a bunch of individuals who are sure that they simply would have thought their way out of prevailing social and scientific conditions of the pre-1800s and cottoned on to better ways of living.
I’m not sure it’s even worth trying to convince these people that they are not, in fact, God’s specialist smartest little guy who defo would have figured all of that out. However, I do think it’s useful to take a look at wild stuff that happens in our society now to show that truly, we are not actually living in some form of enlightened scientific utopia. A prime example of this is the new craze that’s sweeping the nation – the zombie virus 5G conspiracy. Not familiar? Well a weird boomer on twitter is here to explain:
I am using a picture of poor poor Gina here, not because she is the only person who has come up with this particular conspiracy, but because hers is the one I saw most recently, and I don’t feel like seeing any more of this than I already have done. Suffice to say, there is a not insignificant number of people in the United States who know little enough about viruses, 5G, and zombies (???) to make the claim that a thing such as this could happen.
Now let’s compare and contrast that with my good friends living through the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Much is often made by people living now of how silly it was that medieval people didn’t manage to figure out that the Black Death was caused by the bacteria yersinia pestis. This is despite the fact that there were several often quite complex and intelligent suggestions of what might, in fact, be causing the plague. One of the most wide-spread explanations was probably miasma theory, which had been rather in vogue since your boy Galen had written about it back in the second century. Medieval people, of course, were mad for Galen, so it’s no surprise that they were quick to nod toward his theories in the midst of the plague.
The Bishop Bengt Knutsson in Sweden remarked that bad air might cause plague, “as when we see a privy next to a chamber or any other particular thing which corrupts the air in substance and quality, which is a thing which may happen every day. … Sometimes it comes of dead carrion or the corruption of standing waters in ditches or in sloughs or other corrupt places, and these things are sometimes universal and sometimes particular.”[1] Others in the German lands said that following an earthquake, a “corrupt and poisonous earthy exhalation [was released and]… infected the air in various parts of the world which when breathed in by people suffocated them and suddenly snuffed them out”.[2] Others, like a physician in Montpellier, were even able to see that the plague had become air born, noting that “the air breathed out by the sick and inhaled by the healthy people round about wounds and kills them, and that this occurs particularly when the sick are on the point of death.”[3]
This isn’t a million miles off of actual factual germ theory, in that we do get sick from inhaling gross stuff, and from being around other sick people. It’s just that what makes us sick is usually odorless and also a tiny living organism that we can’t see. Interestingly a form of miasma theory being used to explain the prevalence of the Black Death also lives on and is repeated now in myths about the medieval period. I have repeatedly heard people now refer to the fact that “medieval streets were full of shit” to explain the spread of the Black Death. This is interesting because it is 1) not true – most medieval cities tightly regulated the disposal of human waste very strenuously and 2) would be irrelevant anyway even if it were true (it’s not) because that’s not how yersinia pestis travels. It needs to be introduced either through the skin via flea bites, or via inhalation because it has been breathed at someone – much as COVID is spread. So, shit in the streets (which again, I cannot stress enough, was not a thing) would just be gross – not an active way of spreading plague.
I digress here, but people who wisely parrot the saying about gross streets have something in common with little miss 5G virus up there – a not particularly good grasp of germ theory altogether. Here we are – surrounded by the most information we have ever had about germs and how they are spread that has ever existed – and there are still plenty of people who don’t understand how they work. Hell, your girl Gina apparently thinks that cell phones can set viruses off. She’s out here taking part in bold new infection theories. How is she, or any of the people trying to explain the Black Death through myths about the medieval period, smarter than the people who lived through it?
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Yet another interesting thing that some medieval Europeans and Gina have in common was the desire to think that germs were being introduced to a population by malign agents. Gina thinks the government is going to turn you into a zombie via 5G and vaccines, but a lot of the worst medieval Europeans blamed other humans using poison. More specifically, they often blamed either foreigners travelling through their areas, or Jewish people.
One Frisian Franciscan, Herman Gigas, wrote of the antisemitic mania that gripped many parts of Europe thusly, “Some say that it [the plague] was brought about by the corruption of air; others that the Jews planned to wipe out all the Christians with poison and had poisoned wells and springs everywhere. And many Jews confessed as much under torture: that they had bred spiders and toads in pots and pans, and had obtained poison from overseas; and that not every Jew knew about this wickedness, only the more powerful ones, so that it would not be betrayed. As evidence of this heinous crime, men say that bags full of poison were found in many wells and springs, and as a result, in cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany, and in fields and woods too, almost all the wells and springs have been blocked up or built over, so that no one can drink from them or use the water for cooking, and men have to use rain or river water instead.”[4]
This is, of course, absolutely abhorrent and horrifying and makes me want to cry. It also has all the hallmarks of conspiracy theories now. A shadowy group of “elites” who are bent on destroying society? Check. Word of mouth about nebulous proof that this is happening? Check. A weird misunderstanding about how you would even get a poisonous substance in the first place? Oh baby, that’s a huge check. And of course they can justify this flight of fancy because they tortured a bunch of people into agreeing with it. It would be funny if it wasn’t for the violence that people faced. So, it’s not. It’s just gross.
These people were horrible, but they are also not so far off from Gina here who is convinced that some shadowy group of people within the government are going to set off a virus and turn a bunch of people into zombies, or whatever. Gina doesn’t expressly say anything antisemitic here, but it’s a matter of fact that antisemitism is a major factor in many anti-vax conspiracy theories, as the ADL has noted.
To be fair to Gina (though I have no idea why I am being fair to her, if I am being honest) what she and medieval people have in common is the fact that they are working to explain the world around them given their own world views. Medieval Europe was living through a plague so deadly that it seemed like the world was coming to an end. Some of these people experienced life loss of up to seventy percent in their communities! It was an unthinkable amount of carnage, and they were casting about for an explanation – any explanation – for their suffering. They didn’t understand germs, so they looked to ancient authorities to explain how the plague could spread. They lived in a Christian world which expressly painted Jewish people as adversaries, and they lashed out against them. This doesn’t excuse those actions by any means, but it does explain them.
Gina, meanwhile, is a boomer who lives under late capitalism in America – the most capitalist country on planet earth – and her life probably really sucks. Standards of living are rapidly dropping. We are experiencing wide-spread environmental degradation. We, too, are living through a pandemic. She’s been told her entire life that she lives in the greatest country in the world and that her life is as good as anything can possibly be. Everything is for her – and yet it still sucks. She can’t understand that this is just sorta what happens when you let corporations do whatever they want, actually, because she has been told she needs to understand that as an unalloyed good. Her social conditioning and world view tell her that if things are bad, it must be because of some sort of nefarious interlopers attempting to make her life worse. So she’s joined with a weird mob who have an easy explanation – the government is going to turn you into a zombie. Sure. Whatever it takes to help you sleep at night, Gina.
The difference here is that Gina and her weirdo friends, unlike medieval Europeans, have been given every possible way to understand what is going on around them, and are choosing to simply ignore it. They know what germ theory is. They have been given free education. They can read and could learn how to do things like critique cultural hegemony and they are refusing to do it. Instead of trying to understand the world around them given these unimaginable advantages, they are reveling in their ignorance and spreading misinformation. Even typing that sentence I had difficulty deciding whether to call this whole 5G vaccine zombie idea “misinformation”, which is characterised by being told something incorrect and spreading it, or “disinformation”, which is information which is wrong on purpose, because these people are choosing to say something that is literally impossible is going to happen. What do we do with that?
Truly, then, can we say we are so much smarter than a bunch of people who lived seven hundred years ago who just didn’t have access to this information yet? We understand how germs are spread and are still doing this! I would argue that this is magnitudes of order worse than the ignorance of the Middle Ages born of being alive before germs were discovered. I just hope we won’t become as violent.
[1] A Little Book of Pestilence (Mancester, 2911), ed. Rosemary Horrox, in, The Black Death, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 174.
[2] Karl Sudhoff, ‘Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidimie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348: XI’, Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin XI, |(1918-1919), pp. 47-51. Ed and trans in, Ibid., pp. 177-178.
[3]L-A-Joseph Michon (ed.), Documentis inédits sur la grande peste de 1348, these pour le doctorate n médecine, (Paris, 1860), pp. 46-52. Ed. and trans in, Ibid., p. 182.
[4] J.G. Meuschen (ed.), Hermanni Gygantis, ordinis fratrum minorum, Flores Temporum seu Chronicon Universale ab Orbe condito ad annum Christi MCCCXLIX (Leiden, 1750), pp. 138-139. Trans. In Ibid., p, 207.
For more on the Black Death, see:
I assure you, the Black Death was actually bad
A very short introduction to the Black Death
A Black Death reading list
Not every pandemic is the Black Death
For more on myths about the medieval period, see:
I assure you, medieval people bathed
On cats
On the myth of short life expectancy and COVID complacency
On colonial mindsets and the myth of medieval Europe is isolation from the Muslim world
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© Eleanor Janega, 2024
Going Medieval 