[champagnois]

A theory proposed by a professor at my school was:

The black death killed a lot of the people who grouped in churches and ignored the common sense precautions of staying away from people. This could be seen as a culling of what was largely the weak and foolish third of society.

Coincidentally, with fewer people to do the labor around and a generally smarter stock of people remaining, the upper classes were forced to pay more for services that keep the world running. There was a huge impact on labor markets, claimed the professor.

Thirdly, and likely related to all of this, the renaissance began.

[Calavar]

> The black death killed a lot of the people who grouped in churches and ignored the common sense precautions of staying away from people.

Was that really considered common sense before we knew about germ theory? I'm not asking rhetorically; I'm legitimately curious about whether the average medieval peasant had any intuition about the fact that disease was communicable.

[analog31]

I don't know about the Medieval period, but reading a book about Galileo, I noted that his communications with the officials in Rome was hampered by the fact that the cities along the mail route would close their gates and impose a quarantine whenever a plague went through the region. So at least they had a hunch that the disease could be carried from A to B, even if they didn't know by what.

[champagnois]

Even prior to advanced theories, we know of plague doctors who made efforts to protect themselves.

People knew there was something going on between infections that spread them even before the more advanced germ theories of Pasteur.

[denton-scratch]

> plague doctors who made efforts to protect themselves.

Indeed - the figure of Il Dottore from the Commedia Del Arte wears a mask with a long "beak". The beak was stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs; in those days, they thought that it was bad smells that spread disease.

Perhaps people gathered in churches because they burned sweet-smelling incence in churches?

[chmod600]

That theory presumes a correlation between the behaviors that lead to contracting the plague, and a general foolishness/uselessness to society overall. Sounds like a stretch to me, but I'm no expert.