Unit 1- "Europe's Environmental Crisis"

Author Bio: Robert S. Gottfried is a Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Rutgers University. He left the University in 1989. His most famous work is “The Black Death” which is about the plague in Medieval Europe.

Date/Context: Mid 13th to end of 15th century, Europe and much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia  suffered the most severe environmental crisis in history. This worst thing about the times was the presence of the plague, which killed millions of Europeans.

Summary: Gottfried argues that the Black Death should be ranked as the greatest biological-environmental  event in history, because of how it changed nearly everything in Europe. He added that there were some positives for the people who survived the plague, like income increase, but noted how some of these advantages were not seen by the survivors. Being a survivor was terrifying because he or she never knew when the next “attack” was coming. However, the Black Death changed how people lived in Europe forever. Before the plague, the community was the most important thing to the people besides God. Everything the people did was for the community and for God. The plague changed this ideal, turning the people of Europe into independents. Essentially, all ideals before the plague were thrown out with the presence of new ideas that were found better suited by the living people.

Key Quotations:

• “Perhaps the key to understanding the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the watershed between medieval and modern civilizations, is man’s helplessness before nature.”
• “Disaster and depopulation brought no good to those whose lived ended prematurely, and no sense of comfort, security, or well-being to those who survived but lived in bereavement and fear of the next attack.”
• “Life in the monastery approximated on earth the ideal community of heaven more closely than any other form of existence.”
• “It engendered a new society with new attitudes, layers and bonds of authority, sources of wealth, and, most important, new ideas.”