Explain some key features of the social and psychological impact of the Black Death, providing examples of each

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. Among the most extreme reactions to the Black Death was that of the flagellants, penitents who marched from town to town beating themselves, in the belief that such behavior might atone for the human sins they were sure had caused the plague. But the social disruption that the flagellants created paled beside the outbreak of violent anti-Semitism across Europe. In Spain, France, and particularly Switzerland and Germany, the citizenry began to murder their Jewish neighbors. The need to find a scapegoat for the plague spurred on the general population, but it seems likely that officials and city leaders, well aware that the Jews were being blamed for something they had nothing to do with, allowed these pogroms (massacres of Jews) to occur as a way to eliminate their own personal debts and capture Jewish wealth for themselves.
2. More subtle than this wave of violence were the lasting psychological effects of the epidemic, including the doubt cast on the Church’s belief in divine justice. Even more pronounced was a growing social obsession with death, visible in such works as the Dance of Death in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris and in the Book of Hours commissioned by Bonne of Luxembourg, with its extremely realistic depictions of the human body in decay.