Dr. Eleanor Janega

It's something that's said to me all the time on social media.

And I'm like, okay, so in the first place, no, none of that happened.

We see no evidence, like in the record, you would see like a lot of cat bones around if everyone suddenly killed all their cats.

You know, two, cats are seen as completely indispensable in the medieval world because you need to control vermin.

That is absolutely true.

Like monks own cats.

And then also, if that were true, well, what happened in Baghdad, where the church doesn't control everything, right?

But people don't think the Black Death happened places other than Europe, so they just kind of conveniently forget about that.

So there is this tendency to blame people, like the individuals who die at this incredible rate,

in what is the worst pandemic the world has ever seen.

I think to make ourselves feel better, we want to say that this happened because they were stupid.

It's a comforting story that we can tell ourselves.

It's like, oh, well, they were just stupid and that's why they all died of this.

And not that, well, sometimes germs are introduced and there isn't really anything that anyone can do about it and we can't respond quickly enough.

That's scary.

So that's not the story we tell.

We tell the story that, I don't know, medieval Europeans hate cats and we're all punished, which when you say it out loud, it's very funny when you think about it.

But it's also one of these things that people really genuinely believe that to be true.

The thing that I think that people should take away from this is that the medieval world is incredibly interconnected and dependent on trade and movement of people through the entire period, right?

Like that just is the fact of the matter.