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 of historical
diseases and to the general public it remains a thought-provoking subject.
To illustrate, in 2017 over 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 of the Black Death, some of its most
basic characteristics are still debated in academic circles. The focus of this paper
will be on the severity of 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 selective and
less severe disease over time. Due to the scarcity of late medieval sources and
a lack of quantifiable indicators, little is known about the causal mechanisms at
work during the late Middle Ages. This paper offers a newly-compiled database
of 25,610 individuals that died between 1349-1450 in the County of Hainaut to
test a number of assumptions on the selectivity and severity of late medieval
plague outbreaks.