Outline of the society ravaged by the Black Death

The Black Death has often been called ‘a turning point in history’, although usually without persuasive arguments adequate for the analysis of societal and civilizational change being provided in support of such a sweeping statement. Conspicuously, the historical period that the arrival of the Black Death heralded is still called the late Middle Ages or the late-medieval period. This means that this historical period is primarily designated as and, consequently, considered as the societal and cultural continuation of the high Middle Ages and as having the characteristic societal and cultural features of medieval European civilization. On the other hand, the term late medieval characterizes it as the final period of the Middle Ages, the period when medieval societal and cultural features petered out and lost their character as the prevailing systemic features. This implies that the late-medieval period also comprised profound structural changes and transformations that contained the societal requirements for the development of a qualitatively new societal system and, as such, definitionally, of a new historical period, namely the Early-Modern Period.

Such societal shifts are engendered by the accumulation of slow but profound or basic changes in economic, technological, social, demographic, political, cultural and mental structures and in the way they interact in the production of the social processes of societal transformation. In this case, it is implied that the late Middle Ages was characterized by increasing changes of the main structures of society in the direction of modernization, the accumulation of systemic changes that in the end moulded the framework of a qualitatively different social formation or societal system. In other words, as a historical period the late Middle Ages was not only medieval, but increasingly (early) modern, and it is this amalgam of the medieval and early-modern systemic features that lends the late Middle Ages its distinctive character.

This is the central historical meaning of the concept of the Renaissance, a distinct social system that develops in the course of the late Middle Ages with continuity into the early-modern period, when, however, its constituent medieval features are slowly suppressed and supplanted by the further development of the early-modern structural developments until, at some time in the first half of the seventeenth century, early-modern society takes on a clear-cut form.