Severity and Selectivity of the Black Death and Recurring Plague in the Southern Netherlands (1349-1450).

The Black Death is the textbook villain when it comes to the study o f historical diseases and to the general public it remains a thought-provoking subject. To illustrate, in 2 0 17 o ver three million viewers accessed the English Wikipedia's Black Death page, compared to present-day Ebola which only had less than one million. Despite the wide drawing power o f the Black Death, some o f its most basic characteristics are still debated in academic circles. The focus o f this paper will be on the severity o f the Black Death and recurring plague outbreaks in the Southern Netherlands. More specifically it will reflect on the general assumption that plague evolved from a 'universal killer' to a more seleetive and less severe disease over time. Due to the scarcity o f late medieval sources and a lack o f quantifiable indicators, little is known about the causal mechanisms at work during the late Middle Ages.This paper offers a newly-compiled da tabase o f 2 5 ,6 10 individuals that died between 1 3 4 9 - 14 5 0 in the County o f Hainaut to test a number of assumptions on th e selectivity and severity o f late medieval plague outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]