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Home / Periods / Late Medieval / Black Death

Phase

Black Death

1347–1351 CE

The Black Death reached Europe in the late 1340s and killed a vast proportion of the population. It spread through trade routes, ports, towns, villages, armies, and households, producing fear, social disruption, religious anxiety, and economic shock. Its impact extended beyond Europe into the Mediterranean, Middle East, and wider connected world.

The plague matters because it changed labour, landholding, inheritance, religious life, and social expectations. Communities lost priests, parents, children, workers, and rulers, while survivors faced grief and opportunity in unequal measure. Its aftershocks influenced wages, revolt, piety, persecution, and the imagination of death.

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Minette Walters’s The Last Hours, Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders for a later plague setting, and many medieval mysteries use plague as a pressure point. The Black Death suits novels about villages under quarantine, clerics, healers, travellers, scapegoats, inheritance, and the moral strain of survival.

Related people for Black Death

Charles II of Navarre1332–1387 Charles V of France1338–1380 Edward, the Black Prince1330–1376 Edward III of England1312–1377 Edward II of England1284–1327 Gersonides1288–1344 Hugh Despenser the Youngerc. 1286–1326 Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord1301–1364 Isabella of France1295–1358 Joan of Kent1328–1385 John II of France1319–1364 Magnus IV of Sweden1316–1374 Richard II1367–c. 1400 Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March1287–1330 Étienne Marcel1315–1358

Series

Series about Black Death (1 series)

Matthew Bartholomew in Order

by Susanna Gregory 25 books 4.4(24,025)

The Matthew Bartholomew chronicles follow a physician and teacher at Michaelhouse in fourteenth-century Cambridge. Beginning with the arrival of the Black Death in 1348, the series places Bartholomew and his formidable friend Brother Michael inside a university community divided by college rivalries, religious disputes, fragile civic authority and…

Books

13 Best Novels About the Black Death

Non-Fiction

1 Best Non-Fiction Book About the Black Death

Histories, biographies and reference works are listed separately from the historical novels above.