Terrorizing throughout the fourteenth through the eighteenth century, the bubonic plague took the lives of at least one third of the population of Europe. The bubonic plague, also known as the black death, had originally arrived in Europe from rat infested ships bringing spices and other goods back from Asia. The disease then quickly spread throughout Europe as the rats distributed the virus. Throughout Europe there were several mixed reactions to the black death.
The most obvious of the reactions is fear of the plague because England had never been under attack by any illness like this. This sickness had spread lots of skepticism as to how it was spreading. It even had some of the best scholars of the time stumped. Theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (Document 2) said that what the true culprit of the cause of the widespread of the disease was the fact that England had streets full of filth and urine. Erasmus was on the right track. It was not uncommon at the time for people to simply throw out their feces in front of…show more content… Some people saw no problem with using the remains of others in order to receive their inheritance in an untimely fashion. In The Deception of Demons (Document 4) lower class citizens would smear an ointment (usually made with the blood or other bodily fluids of the deceased) onto the doors in Casale and inheriting land and wealth came quicker. Nehemiah Wallington (Document 8) went so far as to prioritize his own family and chose who he’d be more willing to give up in the case that the black plague had infected his family. Those paid to help the sick were no better. As Miguel Parets noted (Document 11) nurses would purposefully speed up the process of the infection in order to receive the pay that they and the patient had agreed
