Memories of pandemics are often contentious. They can be disputed, uncomfortable and politically charged. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to feel more distant, governments, communities and families have started asking how it should be remembered.

Efforts range from personal memorials for lost loved ones to official commemoration programmes. Looking at how earlier societies remembered pandemics can help inform how we commemorate COVID-19 today.

The outbreak of plague in 1346-53, known as the Black Death, was one of the worst pandemics in recorded history. Between a third and two thirds of the medieval European population are thought to have died.

Plague did not disappear, however, and society suffered from repeated outbreaks of the disease in the centuries that followed. As my research demonstrates, despite its pervasive presence, plague may have become something of a taboo subject among survivors, though individual attempts at commemoration have been preserved.

One reason contemporaries avoided discussing plague was because it was believed the disease could be transmitted through imagination itself. People feared that thinking about plague might make it more likely to strike. In his chronicle written in the decade after the Black Death, the Carmelite friar Jean de Venette wrote that:

Such an enormous number of people died in 1348 and 1349 that nothing like it has been heard or seen or read about. And death and sickness came........

© The Conversation