From medieval Black Death, a warning: Pandemics can unleash the ugliest in human nature

The Europe of the Renaissance, founded on reason and scepticism of religious belief, was in many ways birthed by the Black Death. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, appears as a vagina mounted on a horse, armed with bow-and-arrow; penises dressed in pilgrims’ robes carry a crowned vulva in ceremonial procession; a pudendum spit-roasting a penis over a vagina-shaped grease trap: Lewd, humorous and utterly bizarre, the tin badges first dredged out of the mud of the Sienne in 1848, by the archaeologist Arthur Forgeais, soon began turning up in digs across Europe — from England to the Netherlands. Europe’s Jews weren’t the only victims of the Black Death: from the mid-1400s, the historian Nachman Ben Yehuda tells us, killings of supposed witches and heretics escalated, claiming the lives of between 2,00,000-5,00,000 people, 85 percent of them women. “That these executions and the accompanying demonological theories enjoyed widespread and popular acceptance,” he notes, “can be explained through the anomie which permeated society at that time” — anomie brought about by the catastrophic impacts of Black Death. For millennia, the scholars Nico Voigtlaender and Hans-Joachim Voth have shown, the toxic impacts of the Black Plague pogroms have lived on: “Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party”.