Slumberland

During my long blog hiatus, Pinterest came along to provide the ability to “pin” cool images from the Web to save for later perusal. It combines an appeal to the visual with an appeal to the inner collector and hoarder that sits within far too many of us, which makes it more than a little addictive. I have spent way too much time on Pinterest lately, adding and organizing pins, creating new pinboards, and searching for new topics to curate.

At least among my contacts, Pinterest seems to feature a lot of DIY projects, clothes, and recipes. But it’s used to collect other things as well. The other day I stumbled on an interesting pinboard curated by Pamela Saunders on the topic of the Black Death, the medieval pandemic that may have killed one-third of the population of Europe in the late 1340s, and then returned at regular intervals for the next several hundred years.

A mass grave containing probable Black Death victims’ skeletons was found earlier this month in London during excavations for the Crossrail project, which brought this medieval pandemic into the daily news. Pamela’s pinboard links to that story, as well as to artwork inspired by the plague, mourning jewelry, fourteenth-century plague graffiti, and more. It’s an interesting assortment of links if you have any interest in this aspect of medieval history.