Janus Head

Volume 19, Issue 1, 2021

Essays on COVID-19

Plague, Prejudice, and Possibility
Fourteenth-Century Lessons for Our Own Troubled Times

This essay explores connections between the fourteenth-century “Black Death” and the current COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the ways in which prejudice and inequality exacerbate their impacts and considering how the upheaval created by catastrophe creates opportunity for greater equity and community, but also exploitation and oppression, depending on human response.