Hyperrealistic art, the scientific revolution, the modern idea of individual freedom: a strong case can be made that all of it was kickstarted by a pandemic that wiped out half of Europe. This episode is a deep dive into how the Black Death of 1347 to 1351 cracked the medieval order open and let the Renaissance flood in.

We trace the demographics first. With a third to half of Europe dead, the surviving peasants and artisans suddenly held bargaining power, breaking serfdom across much of Western Europe and channeling new wealth into the urban classes. We unpack the cultural shift that followed, the post-plague hunger for memorial art that funded a new generation of painters, sculptors, and architects, and the rise of merchant republics like Florence and Siena that turned banking families like the Medici into patrons.

We  ...