When the Black Death struck Europe, it turned society upside down. The scale of the mortality—possibly up to a quarter of the population died from the plague—transformed economic systems, inflected religious thought, upended old institutions, and created space for new ones to emerge. It struck at the heart of the feudal system, which had long been the defining economic feature of the Middle Ages. For the first time, peasants no longer had to accept the terms dictated to them by the lords for whom they labored. With the population decimated, there were fewer people to work; those who remained were able to use their new leverage to demand better pay and conditions. Meanwhile, with the established authorities powerless to stop the spread of the disease, people began to imagine new approaches to scientific, political, and spiritual questions, paving the way for the currents of thought which would inform the Renaissance, a period which would, in turn, provide much of the intellectual grounding for the Age of Enlightenment.
It is significant that a pandemic would play a role in birthing these intellectual movements. The philosophies which emerged and were refined after the Middle Ages provided many of the values we now use to support health, and which have helped us to address the current pandemic, COVID-19. Centrally, these values are reason, the scientific method, and the pursuit of progress as a common goal worth striving toward. It was during the Enlightenment that our means of understanding the world shifted towards the collection of empirical data, and away from uncritical acceptance of revealed truths or articles of faith. This still serves as the template for scientific inquiry, shaping everything from our understanding of the socioeconomic determinants of health, to the research which has delivered a COVID vaccine.
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