Creative infestation

The fourteenth-century outbreak of Bubonic Plague, known as the Black Death, exerted a transformative impact upon Western Europe, facilitating the development of more empirical and observational forms of medicine and science, weakening the hold of the Catholic Church, and dealing a major blow to the feudalistic state organization and manorial economies. Western society after the Black Death would never look the same again. The Black Death should thus be viewed as laying the foundations of, and a major catalyst for, the emergence of modernity in Western Europe.