In popular culture




  • A Journal of the Plague Year – 1722 book by Daniel Defoe describing the Great Plague of London of 1665–1666
  • Black Death – a 2010 action horror film set in medieval England in 1348
  • I promessi sposi ("The Betrothed") – a plague novel by Alessandro Manzoni, set in Milan, and published in 1827; turned into an opera by Amilcare Ponchielli in 1856, and adapted for film in 1908, 1941, 1990, and 2004
  • Cronaca fiorentina ("Chronicle of Florence") – a literary history of the plague, and of Florence up to 1386, by Baldassarre Bonaiuti
  • Danse Macabre ("Dance of Death") – an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death
  • The Decameron – by Giovanni Boccaccio, finished in 1353. Tales told by a group of people sheltering from the Black Death in Florence. Numerous adaptations to other media have been made
  • Doomsday Book – a 1992 science fiction novel by Connie Willis
  • A Feast in Time of Plague – a verse play by Aleksandr Pushkin (1830), made into an opera by César Cui in 1900
  • Four thieves vinegar – a popular French legend supposed to provide immunity to the plague
  • Geisslerlieder – Medieval "flagellant songs"
  • "A Litany in Time of Plague" – a sonnet by Thomas Nashe which was part of his play Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592)
  • The Plague – a 1947 novel by Albert Camus, often read as an allegory about Fascism
  • The Seventh Seal – a 1957 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
  • World Without End – a 2007 novel by Ken Follett, turned into a miniseries of the same name in 2012
  • The Years of Rice and Salt – an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson set in a world in which the plague killed virtually all Europeans

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14th-century plague

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Previous plague epidemics

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Recent research has suggested plague first infected humans in Europe and Asia in the Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age. Research in 2018 found evidence of Yersinia pestis in an ancient Swedish tomb, which may have been associated with the "Neolithic decline" around 3000 BCE, in which European populations fell significantly. This Y. pestis may have been different from more modern types, with bubonic plague transmissible by fleas first known from Bronze Age remains near Samara. The symptoms of bubonic plague are first attested in a fragment of Rufus of Ephesus preserved by Oribasius; these ancient medical authorities suggest bubonic plague had appeared in the Roman Empire before the reign of Trajan, six centuries before arriving at Pelusium in the reign of Justinian I. In 2013, researchers confirmed earlier speculation that the cause of the Plague of Justinian (541–542 CE, with recurrences until 750) was Y . pestis . This is known as the First plague pandemic.
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