A Conversation with Dr. Albrecht Classen on “Diseases, Death and Disaster during the Medieval Period”

Pragati Das

State Aided College Teacher, Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan, Paschim Medinipur, India.  Email: pragatidaspogo@gmail.com

Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020

Dr. Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at the University of Arizona. He has published more than 105 scholarly books and more than 730 articles on German and European literature and culture. He is the editor of the journals Mediaevistik and Humanities Open Access. He studied at the universities of Marburg, Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800, but he is also involved in contemporary literature, writing poetry and prose. In 2004, the German government bestowed its highest civilian award upon him, the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Band. In 2017, he received the rank of Grand Commander of the Most Noble Order of Three Lions by the Duke of Swabia. He has served four times as President of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. He also served as President of the Arizona Chapter of the American Association of Teaching of German from 1993 to 2019. Since 2020, he is the President of the Society of Contemporary American Writers in German. He has also published 9 poetry volumes of his own and two volumes of his satires (2018 and 2020).

The Interview

In this interview Dr. Albrecht Classen talks with Pragati Das.

PD: Dear Sir, you are a renowned authority on Medieval Studies with years of experience into the state of things during the period. The medieval period experienced waves of epidemics and the spectacle of suffering was a common one. We are going to bring out a special issue on the human experiences of death, diseases and disaster from our Golden Line Magazine, published by the Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan. We would like to get your insights into that kind of experience during the medieval period and relate it to our current pandemic situation. Please enlighten us on the points I am going to present before you. What were the major factors that introduced the Medieval Period?

AC: A rather difficult question because there are no clear landmarks anywhere or at any time throughout world history telling us that suddenly a new age had set in, maybe apart from a revolution, or the declaration of independence (USA, India, etc.). There were always many factors involved when an epoch came to an end, such as the fall of the Roman Empire in the West when in 476 Romulus Augustulus was toppled and killed by Germanic tribes. However, the Roman system did not simply disappear overnight; instead in the course of the subsequent centuries increasingly Germanic systems took over, formed their own kingdoms, and changed the entire structure, leading over to the medieval period, which was finally fully established when the Frankish ruler Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome in 800. The focus of the western world had shifted north beyond the Alps. One could also argue that the Roman Empire had been weakened dramatically by waves of pandemics, including malaria, and the administrative structure had become as top-heavy as the military, burdensome, costly, and inefficient. The Romans had spent too much on the military and thus had weakened their interior system, making them vulnerable to external attacks, especially in the West (Eastern Rome in Constantinople maintained its power until 1453).

PD: Will you clarify Sir, the key elements of the beginning of Early Medieval & the Late Medieval period? 

AC: The early Middle Ages were characterized by the establishment of Germanic kingdoms, mostly on the basis of the Roman Empire, such as in England, Iberia, France, Germany, and Italy (all in modern terms). They established their own legal and political system (feudalism) but also embraced increasingly the Christian faith. This was also the period when numerous external forces threatened early medieval Europe, such as the Saracens (Arabs) from the southwest, the Vikings (from the north), the Avars and then the Magyars (from the east). Both the states and the Church fought vehemently against them, often in tandem, and in that process new state structures with strong military forces emerged.

The late Middle Ages were dominated by a steady decline of the Church, which ultimately led to the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Also, the printing press was invented in ca. 1450, which radically transformed the media world and education. Urban life with trade and banking gained extreme importance, while the rural population struggled to gain more freedom (mostly in vain). We also have to keep in mind the tremendous growth of universities since the 12th century (Paris, Bologna, Padua, Montpellier, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Salerno, etc.); and people began to travel much more, either as pilgrims or as merchants, so the late medieval roads were rather crowded. There would be much more to say for both points…

PD: What was the normal condition of public health in that period? In several archives we can find evidence of diseases like dysentery, malaria, diphtheria, flu etc. But which diseases would be seasonal epidemic in a cyclical form for humans and animals?

AC: Everything depended on your social class, just as today. The hygienic conditions for the nobles and the clerics were surprisingly good, and there were hospitals around already since the early thirteenth century. The great Black Death followed suit periods of colder climates, famine, and thus people’s weakened status. Even though the Pest preliminarily died down in ca. 1351 (it could no longer find enough ‘hosts’), it reappeared throughout the next centuries on a regular basis. Malaria was more of a problem in the southern Mediterranean regions (as until today). There were all kinds of other diseases, of course, again just as today, but the real issue was the Pest, and whatever the case, even the best doctors did not even know of any real remedies except to advise escaping from the location where the plague had broken out.

PD: Literature represents the crisis of human society through imagery as Marianne’s fever in Sense and Sensibility and Jane’s nervous collapse in Jane Eyre.  How those reports on the public health are recorded in Literature and Arts in this period?

AC: Late medieval art is deeply determined by the theme of death, reflecting the increasing experience with it due to the pandemic of the Black Death, and other massive diseases. Literature from that time also represents this, such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman (ca. 1370) and Johann Tepl’s Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (ca. 1400). Death became a major theme also in art, such as the many famous drawings of the “Dance of Death” (Lübeck, Berlin, and especially Reval, today Tallinn).

PD: The medieval period covers a vast span of time and it produced many philosophers, scientists and thinkers. Was there any systematic attempt at understanding the diseases scientifically?

AC: The medical field in the Middle Ages was fairly advanced, but since the 12th century it became increasingly academic, from then on drawing to a large extent from the ancient Galenic teachings of the four humours, which meant that medicine became the professional occupation by men, whereas women, who traditionally used to resort to herbal and related medicines according to practical experiences, where mostly excluded from then on. Medical research, however, could not improve because access to the microbial level was not possible. One of the major efforts to fight pandemics and other significant diseases was to subject patients to the bleeding process, which might be useful for a healthy person, but certainly not to sick persons. Altogether, then, no, there was no systematic attempt to handle the Black Death or parallel pandemic diseases.

PD: What were the roles of public institutions and authorities in the epidemics and the disasters?

AC: Public institutions tried to help as much as they could, but there was nothing else to do but to support the establishment of public hospitals, to improve the sewer system and clean water supply, which did not work particularly well until the nineteenth century. Many city authorities simply imposed a ‘lock-down,’ meaning that they did not allow outsiders to come in.

PD: Representation of Death was included with the personification of Satan as diseases. How did Christianity and the other religions react towards this imagery?

AC: No, the massive deaths were not associated with Satan, although the pandemics were often seen as a punishment by God for people’s sinfulness. This led to the phenomenon of the flagellants in many places of Europe. More sinister were the pogroms against the Jews who were at times falsely identified as the culprits of the Black Death and were accused of well-poisoning, which did not make sense because the Jews suffered probably the most from the Pest since they lived in their ghettos and had even worse hygienic conditions than the Christians. But the pandemic was a convenient excuse to persecute the Jewish population, either expelling it entirely from a city, or, worse, to kill them and take over their properties.

PD: How did the warring parties make use of diseases as biological weapons in medieval warfare? 

AC: That was practiced to some extent by the crusaders or the defending Muslims during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but not in Christianized Europe. Even the bodies of slain opponents were treated respectfully (see Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm).

PD: Did the design of cities as forts during the period help in resisting the infectious diseases? Or did it the opposite? 

AC: Rather the opposite was the case b/c the city wall only meant that people had to live in crammed quarters. Also, most cities still had their cemeteries next to the church or cathedral, and only by the late 15th century or so were they moved outside of the cities to protect people from toxic fluids coming from the graves.

PD: What was the added impact of The Book of John as a manifesto of Apocalypse for the medieval people fighting various crises? 

AC: Of course, the Black Death and its subsequent waves hitting Europe far into the seventeenth century were regularly regarded as the coming of the Apocalypse, and preachers resorted regularly to the Book of Revelation to discipline their parishes.

PD: How did Plague, a devastating global epidemic, occupy the dominant role in framing the historiography of Europe?

AC: The Black Death has been regularly used as the big benchmark for the separation of the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, which, however, today no longer makes good sense and should be dispensed with altogether. True, ca. 30% of the European population died, and it took ca. 50-80 years for Europeans to recover, but in the aftermath of the Black Death not many social structures changed at all. Labourers and farmers were in short supply, so wages tended to increase, but the political and social system remained mostly the same. We even tend now to dismiss the term ‘Renaissance’ because it does not help us much at all to discriminate between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, for instance.

PD: Was the Gothic, to some extent, inspired by the experiences of diseases and death?

AC: No, not at all. On the contrary, it emerged in the late twelfth century as a result of many different factors connected with climate change, increased resources, decreased internecine warfare, the introduction of Roman law, more peaceful borders, a growth of education (math, physics, etc.) and hence also architecture. The older style, Romanesque, was no longer needed b/c churches, for instance, no longer served also for defence purposes (except: in south eastern Europe, the Balkans, where the Muslim Ottomans waged ever more successful military campaigns against the Christians). The Gothic arose as a result of the desire for more light, more glory, more grace, and more spirituality going upwards in physical and spiritual terms.

PD: Were there some diseases because of human violation of nature? I mean deforestation for making farm lands and gathering woods for war? 

AC: Deforestation happened, yes, but this normally led to more agriculture and hence more food. Well-fed people are less susceptible to infectious diseases.

PD: How did the creative people respond to the crisis after it was over?

AC: In a way, the crisis was never fully over, but the problems shifted. The Black Death came back in many intervals far into the sixteenth century, but by then a new medical problem arose, imported from the Americas, syphilis.

PD: How would you consider our current situation of the pandemic in relation to our past pandemic experiences? 

AC: Thankfully, today we have a good understanding of bacteria and viruses, which was not the case at all in the Middle Ages. However, even our best knowledge does not solve many of the problems we face currently because evolution constantly creates new challenges (we have, e.g., no real understanding of Ebola so far). But as a consequence of the Black Death, ca. 30% of the entire European population died in the middle of the fourteenth century alone, i.e., ca. 30 million (and there were more or less equally massive deaths in Asia and Africa); by contrast, we are currently looking at only ca. 225 k deaths worldwide (end of April 2020), when our global population consists of ca. 9.1 billion people.

PD: How do you reflect upon our future? How should we live after the Corona? What lifestyle do we need to adopt? What about the speed of our civilization we achieved? Should we devise a new strategy? 

AC: These are very big questions, and not even the best medical researchers would be able to answer them. Of course, we have to observe cleanliness much more than before, but nothing can really protect us from the viruses unless we have a vaccine. So, my answer can only go into a very different direction. How should we live? Either before or after COVID-19, pursue love, be a good person, strive for inner and outer peace, be wise, acquire knowledge, remain humble, be a good friend, avoid the Seven Deadly Sins (vices), help your community and your family, pursue friendship, be a good teacher, respect your neighbors and, above all, nature, and make sure that you leave behind something after your death which will remind posterity of you in positive terms. My personal goal is to be the best scholar possible, and as such to contribute to my field to a maximum, Medieval Studies. I want to help the young generation in profiting as much as possible from the insights developed already by medieval poets, philosophers, theologians, artists, and others because the past is simply a crucial stepping stone for our future. Sometimes, looking backwards allows us to look forward with a much sharper eye. Also, suffering in physical terms allows us to gain much deeper insights spiritually and forces us commonly to probe more profoundly what the meaning of our lives might be, or how to live out relevance, by being a good citizen.