This paper, written for Professor Joy Kammerling's seminar on the Renaissance and the Reformation, analyzes Luther's writings on the bubonic plague. In the late twentieth century, it is difficult or impossible to comprehend fully the intense horror and consuming fear that must have accompanied outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Europe. Nothing in today's world compares with the threat this contagion posed in the Middle Ages and the early modern era. With no particular warning or explanation, the black death swept in successive waves across the continent from the mid-fourteenth century until well into the 1700s.
Most historians agree the plague came to Europe from East Asia aboard trading ships.
But no matter its origin, the plague left behind ghastly destruction. Entire cities were paralyzed by epidemics. Some villages disappeared altogether. The very worst of the plague's many outbreaks occurred in the 1340s, but the disease continued to resurface in the sixteenth century, while Martin Luther and the Reformation sought to change many of the Christian church's fundamental teachings. Certainly few events in this period would so likely provoke religious questions as a bout with the plague.