Ithat in heill wes and gladness Am trublit now with gret seiknes And feblit with infermite: Timor mortis conturbat me.
The first stanza of William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, composed c.1500, reveals three pressing concerns of Scotland’s people in the Middle Ages: illness, death and the uncertainty of the afterlife. Living through the pandemic since March 2020 has brought us the closest in living memory to understanding the dayto-day preoccupation with life and death that gripped our medieval ancestors. All were linked through the medieval Christian association of disease with sin, so that disease was seen as the physical consequence and punishment for sinful behaviour. For them, just like us in the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unseen presence of an illness that could kill, regardless of age and health, the fear of infection by people around them and even from the everyday items they touched, and painful, frightening separation in illness and in dying from those who were dearest to them were terrifying experiences for which they sought answers through their faith. We have microbiology, virology and epidemiology to explain what it was that assailed us; mass-media to broadcast how best to protect ourselves; bureaucratic governments and health-care professions to organise support and care for those affected; and access to global expertise to find protection against Covid-19. Without that knowledge of disease’s natural origins, they could only explain it in terms of the supernatural or the satanic.
Understandably, the plague epidemics that ravaged Europe from the middle of the 14th century were the most terrifying of all for them. In them, they saw God unleashing a disease either directly or through the works of the devil and his agents to punish humanity for what their spiritual leaders said was their moral degeneracy and spiritual laxity. It was, for them, the unmistakable proof that death was unquestionably the wage of sin and that sudden, painful and disfiguring disease was God’s chosen means to rescue humanity from its sinful ways.
Such strong belief in disease’s spiritual origin caused profound distrust of medicine amongst the medieval clergy.
