Conclusion

The blog was started with the intention of answering the question, "how do the depictions of death in illustrated manuscripts during the Black Plague reflect the attitudes of the medieval society both socially and religiously?

A few of the problems I ran into while researching this topic had to deal with finding reputable sources. From my research, I had to rely on the use of non-scholarly sources, as there just isn't much to be found that really goes in depth with this topic. The scholarly sources that I found and used, primarily dealt with more of the political and social aspects of society rather than the true feelings of society. I figure this has a lot to do with the fact that most of this history isn't written from the eyes of the average citizen but rather from the clergy and other powerful figures which tend to leave sort of a jaded version of it.

However, the sources that I did use did a damn good job at explaining the symbolism and meanings of what was depicted in the art. These symbols and their meanings helped draw connections to societal attitudes from politics to religion. I find these sources to more valuable in answering my original question.

For my conclusion, I have to be honest and say that I truly do not feel like I have a definite answer for my research question. I feel as if I have answered a portion of it, but to assess how it changed society is in my opinion nearly impossible. The lack of first-hand accounts from the people I want to hear from, the average citizen, makes this research one sided. I have read into many accounts from people representing the Church, but these two are biased and one sided.

Honestly, if I could go back to the beginning of the semester I would either change my research question altogether or at least modify it to be more researchable.  As for my readers, like I said in my previous week’s post, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at any time and I will try to answer them to the best of my ability. 

Last Update

Okay, I jumped the gun a bit last week and I thought I concluded the blog for this semester. Well, I was wrong; so, one week left of the blog and because it is almost impossible to pick up from last week, I am going to go back this week and discuss a book review over the Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market. The primary reason I am choosing to go over this review as it offers more insight on the effects of the Black Plague through a scholarly outlook.

One of the main differences in my research of the effect of the Black Death on illustrated manuscripts compared to what Steinhoff wrote in Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market is the focus on religion. Susan Stuard asserts in her review of the book that "Steinhoff acknowledges that the "golden age" of Sienese painting arrived early in the century and continues through the last decades of the century. In this later era she finds an extremely sophisticated and self-conscious sponsorship of art intended to promote both religious and civic agendas."[1]

I have argued about the change in civic agendas as well as the change in how society viewed death and deathways  in the 13^th-14^th centuries. Religion was never an aspect that I focused on primarily due to the fact that the manuscripts rarely reflected anything to do with the Church.

Steinhoff and I do agree though on the change in depiction. Stuard concludes, “Steinhoff regards Bulgarini and other painters who survived into this era as striving for a synthesis of the diverse visual and thematic traditions that they inherited. Moreover, the author sees both pluralism and the attempts at synthesis as positive and artistically creative.”[2]

The evidence that I have presented throughout the semester focuses on the very same ideas. Illustrated manuscripts before the plague focused less on pluralistic ideology and more on simplicity. What I left out and what I find important though is the emphasis on religion; I have mentioned in some of my previous posts about how everyone including clergy was affected by the plague and it changed the way people felt about the social hierarchy. Steinhoff refutes my beliefs and argues that people still used religion as their guiding principal and it is reflected through illustrated manuscripts, in particular, the Sienese.

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[1] Stuard, Susan Mosher. 2007. "Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market."American Historical Review 112, no. 4: 1250-1251. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed December 8, 2013).

[2] Ibid

Wrapping Up

So were finally coming down on the last few weeks of the semester and this course; I know it feels like I am repeating myself when I say that I have thrown a lot of information at you, but the truth is that I have. So this final week I am going to take this week's blog and just rehash all the evidence I have presented and answer any questions if you have any.

The first week of this blog I gave a historical background of the Black Death and discussed how it spread, why it spread, and the societal changes that the spread caused. One of the most important things to remember from the first week was that the plague caused much social unrest. The Feudal System depended upon class constructs; death affected not only the poor but the rich as well thus hastening the decline of the system.

The second week of the blog I focused on art before the Black Death. I felt that it's important and necessary to look at illustrated manuscripts before the Black Death to be able to compare it to manuscripts after that Black Death in order to see if a change in society was represented in these manuscripts. For this week, the idea that I wanted my readers to focus on and take away from my blog was that virtually of art before the peak of the Black Death was painted in this style. According to Medrano-Cabral the "Medieval artist strove for realism; churches and monasteries were covered in inscriptions, paintings and sculptures that portrayed biblical scenes or saints." Death in this time was not to be feared but rather revered as the natural passage between ones time on earth and their future in the afterlife. When the plague began to spread across Europe, that attitude quickly changed.

From this point on in the blog I start to look at the changes in the manuscripts and try to relate these changes with the changes in society. A few of the most important ideas to remember from these weeks include the change in the manuscript itself. Before the Black Death really took hold in Europe, illustrated manuscripts lacked the harsher reality. One of the examples I left for these week's was Duccio's Crucifixion.

"Marked by crowded, paranoid compositions, ugly, menacing faces, bright colors and increased violence, Black Death art is unbalanced and uneasy. In Duccio’s Crucifixion, we can see the fierce conspiratorial expressions in the crowd as they point up to Christ, whose side is spurting blood. Mary falls against a group of women, including Mary Magdalene, ready to faint." 

I took one week and went away from the manuscripts themselves and offered statistical evidence of the Black Death to see if it compares with the changes in the manuscript. "Analyses were done using a sample of 337 individuals excavated from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, which contains only individuals who died during the Black Death in London in 1349–1350. The age patterns from East Smithfield were compared to a sample of 207 individuals who died from non-epidemic causes of mortality. Ages were estimated using the method of transition analysis, and age-specific mortality was evaluated using a hazards model. The results indicate that the risk of mortality during the Black Death increased with adult age, and therefore that age had an effect on risk of death during the epidemic. The age patterns in the Black Death cemetery were similar to those from the non-epidemic mortality sample. The results from this study are consistent with previous findings suggesting that despite the devastating nature of the Black Death, the 14th-century disease had general patterns of selectivity that were similar to those associated with normal medieval mortality."

I concluded that these findings had no affect on what had previously been discussed about the changes in society and their affect on the illustrated manuscripts. Although I was a bit disappointed that this information didn't lend to my study; however, I did find it necessary to look into other aspects of the Black Death and try to draw a few more conclusions.

After a few more weeks of discussing illustrated manuscripts and their importance and impact on society, I displayed a video that basically concluded what I had been saying for the last few weeks. If you have any questions over any of the information I have presented over the course of this semester, don't hesitate to ask. This week's entry was kind of shallow and didn't present any new information but I felt that it was necessary to tie up any loose ends.