ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 brings together a new wealth of quantitative information on epidemic mortality. The Black Death of 1349–51 had a severe impact in some parts of the Low Countries—although evidence suggests that other outbreaks, both before (in the thirteenth century) and after the Black Death (in the second half of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), might have been worse. Usually, late-medieval epidemics preceded grain price spikes and hence suggest that these outbreaks created production and distribution problems rather than vice-versa. Severe epidemic outbreaks continued into the early modern period—and the exceptional severity and spread of the 1636 plague was comparable to that of 1630 in northern Italy. In particular, epidemics were especially damaging for rural areas away from the commercial cores of the Low Countries—challenging a narrative that accentuates the urban character of diseases such as plague in the late-medieval and early modern periods. Most epidemics were selective along the lines of age, sex, and socio-economic status. A wide variety of evidence shows that adult women in the Low Countries were more severely afflicted by epidemics compared to men, relative to normal patterns of mortality—although contextual social, economic, and cultural conditions created key exceptions.
