Often as not, I spend my walking time listening to podcasts, most commonly lectures from The Great Courses. They are, unsurprisingly, survey courses which rarely drill down into the minutiae of their subject. You can be very general in your choice of course, such as a series on The Middle Ages, or you can be a little more specialised, choosing say, The Black Death, as a course title. It is just such a course and topic that I am listening to now.

It is not easy taking in 24 lectures on The Black Death without a break here and there, because it can dampen the spirit, so to speak. Our ancestors in the mid-14th century had it very bad indeed, with one in two people losing their lives to the pestilence. When it struck, you were dead a day or two later and likely all the folks around you died too. It had a profound effect upon the structure of society, loosening the grip of the Three-Estates and the influence of the Church. If the priests were dying too and in as great a number, where was God? What good was a church that had no answers?

Actually, there were many theories but nobody had any real answers about the origins or spread of the plague. No-one thought of rats or fleas, the latter proliferating wherever humans were living in numbers. Pilgrimages to holy sites, good for the soul, proved calamitous for pilgrims - all those people moving from place to place in close proximity. What could possibly go wrong? But they didn't know any better and I suspect that come a new pestilence, we will be in the same muddle.

A whole art and literature emerged around a meditation upon death. Memento Mori, 'remember, you must die', became a kind of mantra around which one might reflect on the brevity of life and the inevitable levelling of all classes of people, no matter who. Today death is screened off from us, the deceased hidden away or altered cosmetically to soften the blow. But back then, death was right in your face all the time. Surely it was wise then to reflect - all we strive for is lost, at the last.

Which brings me to this cheery piece from Danse Macabre by Hans Holbein(1549). It looks grim to us now, but is no less truthful for all that.

"Not so fast!"