ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the "obsession" with death, or a "death culture," that is assumed to have prevailed in the wake of the Black Death. It addresses what should replace "waning" as a historical narrative of the late Middle Ages. The "agrarian crisis" can refer either to the inability of medieval agriculture to feed and sustain Europe's growing numbers of people or so before the Black Death, or else to a contraction of arable production and acreage in the aftermath of the plague. An "economic crisis" was caused by an overall contraction in trade and manufacturing in the wake of the Black Death, which reached its peak during the "Great Slump" of the mid-fifteenth century. Some more scholars of late medieval death culture have followed Johan Huizinga's lead in seeing the artistic and literary motif revolving around the skeleton or cadaver as expressing an unhealthy obsession or fascination with death, or what has also been called a "necromania".
