The Black Death

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church officials, thus contributing to the loss of religious faith.

When looking into the faith of the people prior to the Renaissance and Reformation era, it is interesting to note how beliefs begin to change during and after the Black Death in 1348. The Black Death along with contributing factors like famine and poverty led many people of medieval Europe in the mid-fourteenth century to question the protection afforded by the church and the power of God, or even if one exists. However, these crises led not just to the people losing their faith in the church and clergy but also a loss of their faith in God. The combination of a corrupt clergy profiting during times of vast suffering and the awareness that prayer and honorable moral acts no longer elicited God's protection caused people to lose their sense of dependence on the Almighty.

The people that lived in the path of the epidemic were damned from the beginning because of the Great Famine in 1315, which increased ...

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the evils of man and thus signaling the end of the world to contracting the disease from having contact with an infected person, or even being looked at by an infected person. Writing in the mid-Fourteenth century, Boccaccio observed and described how touching the cloths of an infected person would lead ultimately to death.

". . . the rags of a pauper who had died from the disease were thrown into the street, where they attracted the attention of two pigs. . . .within a short time they began to writhe as though they had been poisoned, they both dropped dead to the ground. . . upon the rags that had brought about their undoing."

Accounts like this, show that the notion of something ...

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