Lecture 34: The Great Plague
Vernacular Literature
• Vernacular literature—increasingly widely disseminated with
the invention of the printing press in 1440—testified to another
kind of lay restlessness and portended later and greater changes.
The century that saw the Black Death savage Europe also saw the
beginnings of the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical learning.• In England, roughly contemporary works provided a lay viewpoint
on the condition of the church and society.
o Piers Plowman, a work in Middle English attributed to William
Langland (c. 1362–c. 1387), is an intense moralistic poem in
which a simple plowman guides people to the truth. The work
is profoundly medieval in sensibility and deeply critical of
worldly abuse in the church.o The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400)
recounts the stories told by pilgrims on the way to the shrine
of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, evoking the wide range of
late-medieval religious postures, from the sincerely pious to
the hypocritically ribald.• In France, François Villon (1431–d. after 1463) attended the
University of Paris, reveled among the disreputable, and killed
a priest in a brawl. He was also the finest French poet of the late
Middle Ages, with little of piety intruding in his verse. A century
later, François Rabelais (1494–1553), a former Franciscan and
Benedictine, became a physician and wrote the bawdiest of all great
satires, Gargantua and Pantagruel.• In Italy, two authors in particular signaled the beginning of the
Humanism characteristic of the Renaissance—a rediscovery
of classical sources and ideals that would deeply challenge the
certainties of the medieval worldview.
o Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374) spent his early
life in Avignon; he was a great scholar who studied law at the
University of Bologna and was deeply interested in Greek and
Latin literature. He wrote extensively in Latin but was most