Miri Rubin, Samuel Cohn & Paul Binski on the Black Death - A plague on all our houses [audio 43min]

In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arrived at the busy port of Messina in Sicily. Readying to dock, it would have nosed in among many similar ships doing similar things. But this ship was special because this ship had rats and the rats had fleas and the fleas had plague. Within four years, over a third of the population of Europe lay dead. This was the Black Death, and its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio who declared"In those years a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat". The Black Death devastated Europe, changed its economics and broke up its society, but did the disease also bring subtler transformations in its art, its religion and its intellectual outlook? Presenter Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of ideas and debates their application in modern life with his guests Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London; Samuel Cohn, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow; and Paul Binski, Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Baron Bragg--historian, journalist, novelist--is Domus Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford; Chancellor of Leeds University; President of Britain's National Campaign for the Arts; a Governor of the London School of Economics; and Chair of Britain's Arts Council Literature Panel.