Western Civilization I / Unit 12 WC1 1125 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Classifying a Late-Medieval Response: Quarantine, Prayer, Scapegoat, Revolt
The idea
The exam describes a reaction to the crises and asks what kind it was. The method is two questions: who acts, and against what. Quarantine: towns act against contagion, partly effective. Prayer and penance: individuals and the Church act against sin, the Flagellants the extreme. Scapegoating: mobs act against a minority, the massacres of Jews. Revolt: peasants act against lords who froze wages, the Jacquerie and thirteen eighty-one.
In practice
Five cases. A port refusing ships for forty days: quarantine. Men whipping themselves through the streets to appease God: penance. A town accusing its Jews of poisoning wells and killing them: scapegoating. Peasants marching on London to demand an end to serfdom: revolt. A sixth, the trick: a lord's statute fixing wages at pre-plague levels is not a response of the kind listed but the cause of the revolts.
Where people slip
Responses overlapped in one town in one year. Classify by target: contagion, sin, a minority, or a lord.
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