“A third of the world died.” That would have meant about 20 million deaths. In other words, from 1347 to about 1350, medieval Europe experienced perhaps the greatest calamity in human history. It shouldn’t surprise us that this plague, or the Black Death as it is often called, left its mark on medieval Christianity. But in many cases, the mark it left looked as hideous as the symptoms of the Black Death itself. Death in an afternoon. In the plague’s early stages in Paris, 800 people died a day,