The Black Death, caused by Yersinia pestis and spread primarily via flea bites from infected rats, arrived in Sicily in 1347 and swept across Europe over the following years, killing an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population. Cities, monasteries, and rural communities alike were devastated. The social, economic, and psychological impact was without parallel in European history, reshaping labour relations, religious authority, and the arts for centuries.

Few events in history have so profoundly shaped literary production. Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron used the plague as its frame narrative, while Petrarch, who lost Laura to the Black Death, wrote grief-stricken poems that helped define the sonnet tradition in European literature. In England, the plague created the conditions for the rise of the vernacular by drastically reducing the Latin-educated clergy and opening space for poets like Chaucer. The Dance of Death (Danse Macabre) tradition in visual art and verse arose directly from plague mortality.