Amid virus, a morbid fascination with ‘Black Death’ series

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Purdue University English professor Dorsey Armstrong was well known in a way that only other enthusiasts of medieval literature and culture might appreciate.

She once got a discount on a replica of an Anglo-Saxon drinking horn — made from an actual cattle horn — because a guy at a conference recognized her.

“That’s the only time I felt famous,” said Armstrong, an expert in medieval studies who heads the English department at Purdue in Indiana.

“I got a really cool drinking horn. And whenever I teach Beowulf, I bring it out and I pass it around.”

But since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Armstrong, 49, has gained a whole new level of acclaim for her Old World expertise. She’s the narrator of The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague, a video series that became must-see TV this spring when it aired on Amazon Prime, just as stuck-athome, 21st-century humans were reeling from the coronavirus crisis.

In 24 surprisingly compelling episodes, Armstrong introduced the devastation of the mid-14th century to doom-obsessed modern viewers. The flea-driven plague, also known as the “Great Mortality,” overran Eurasia and Northern Africa from 1347 to 1353, killing tens of millions of people and wiping out half of Europe’s population.

The series was filmed before the coronavirus pandemic, in 2016, as part of The Great Courses, a compendium of college-level audio and video lectures. The Black Death has spurred a broad cult following for Armstrong — even as it underscores the dismaying parallels between the great plague and the deadly disease now circling the globe.

“I just wish that the course were not quite so relevant at the moment,” said Armstrong, whose parents and siblings are among those who have contracted COVID-19 and recovered.

Since March, she has received daily emails from people who binge-watched The Black Death, all wanting to know whether things are as bad now as they were back then.

The answer, thankfully, is no, Armstrong said.

Although COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, has a±icted more than 26.3 million people and killed at least 869,500 worldwide, the proportion of deaths does not compare with the devastation caused by the “Great Mortality.”

The ferocious pandemic was dubbed the bubonic plague, reflecting the painful and (at the time) mysterious swellings, known as buboes, that developed in the lymph nodes of the neck, armpits and groin of those infected. The swellings oozed blood and pus, even as the unfortunate patients suffered other terrible symptoms: fever, chills, body aches, vomiting and diarrhea — often followed quickly by death.

The disease could take other grisly forms, Armstrong said: pneumonic plague, which infects the lungs, and septicemic plague, where the infection spreads to the blood, often causing skin on the fingers, toes and nose to blacken and die.

The Black Death originated in China and spread along trade routes, turning the Silk Road into a superhighway of infection. It arrived in many places through trading ships, long believed to be carried by the fleas on rats that coexisted closely with humans. A more recent theory contends that fleas and lice on humans themselves helped spread the disease widely.

As deaths mounted, populations in region after region struggled vainly to understand its cause or cure.

“The good news is that, all things considered, we are in a much better position than those poor people who had to survive the Black Death,” Armstrong said. “The mortality rate for the Black Death, for those who contracted it, was something like 80 percent. And we’re still in single digits.”

The modern world also has the advantage of seven centuries of scientific discovery that can root the current pandemic in a rogue coronavirus and target a treatment — and ultimately a vaccine — based on that understanding.