I have been obsessed over the past few days by a dry and brilliant book by historian Bruce Campbell, entitled The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World. Each word in that title is meaningful. The Great Transition was an irreversible transformation in human societies and ecologies across Eurasia, which took hold in the 1340s-1370s. Three factors interacted to tip the balance of humans and nature: climate change, social instability and the bubonic plague.
The reason why I can't stop thinking about this book is that it describes how pandemic disease, social conflict and climate change amplified each other's effects, in a cycle that lasted over 150 years. This was not a simple epidemic outbreak, from which Europeans could recover. It was a permanent transformation.

Readings:
Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016.)
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1348-1351.) “First Day: Introduction” (trans. J. M. Rigg, 1903). See especially lines 008-048.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Frank Palmeri, “Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of COVID-19,” History News Network April 12, 2020. .
Map, “Second Pandemic of the Black Death in Europe,” Encyclopedia Britannica.

Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.