An Omni-Crisis at the Intersection of Disciplines: Teaching the Black Death to STEM and Humanities Students

This paper was originally presented at the virtual symposium, "Teaching the Middle Ages and Renaissance to STEM Students," Georgia Institute of Technology, 4 December 2023, and was revised for publication in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART). Publication of the proceedings of the meeting has been delayed, so I am sharing this penultimate version so that it may be of use to instructors currently in the classroom. The essay takes its title from science writer Ed Yong, who, in referring to COVID, has called pandemics "omni-crises": events that have the potential to touch and transform nearly every aspect of human existence. The late medieval plague pandemic was very much that, and it has been taught by Medieval and Renaissance scholars in all disciplines, from literature to art history to music to economics. But as the developments of the past decade and a half have shown, it can and should also be taught from the perspective of the sciences—and not simply for science majors but for all students who seek to understand how we live in, affect, and are affected by the natural world. The paper focuses on two key challenges of teaching "the new paradigm" in plague studies, and two key pedagogical perspectives that instructors may wish to anticipate and incorporate into their presentations. The two key challenges involve zeroing in on the scientific principles necessary to appreciate the way pandemics are understood and investigated now: that is, the evolution of pathogens and the ways scientific data can be used to make historical arguments. The two key pedagogical perspectives involve teaching students how to think of the microbial world before there were microscopes, and engaging with the ethical questions raised by newly developing technologies and channels of communication. For a generation of students who already understand that pandemics are indeed "omni-crises," courses focused on the Second Plague Pandemic can be a portal onto a new perspective of their own changing world.