around 1300, it seemed that the population, to some degree everywhere in Europe, had attained its maximum and reached a ceiling. There were still few signs allowing one to foretell the slowing-down of the expansion begun almost three centuries before; these signs were to multiply in the first half of the fourteenth century. It was then, in the very middle of the century, that the terrible knell of the Black Death sounded. Thus a period opened characterised by the deadly and repeated attacks of what contemporaries interpreted as a sign of divine anger provoked by human depravity. The century closed, in fact, with another major epidemic of the terrible illness and the fifteenth, begun in an atmosphere of mourning, was to bear its ineradicable stigmata. The plague henceforth accompanied medieval man as ineluctably as, to use the words of Alain Chartier, ‘the abominable sum of infinitely wicked evils’: hunger, war, death.

No historian doubts that the brutal irruption of a scourge which was to become a pandemic and affect the European population for centuries stimulated profound upheavals in modes of production, living and feeling. An evaluation of the precise effects of the epidemic, of its place in the period’s procession of evils, is more difficult. Did the plague, falling upon Europe, operate autonomously to subvert or renew the structures of feudal society? Was the terrifying skeleton which led an entire society in the Dance of Death the model on which historians should base their analyses?