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This work offers alternative conclusions about the cultural and psychological reactions to the plague, why it led more often to Renaissance optimism than to widespread despair as so often concluded, especially from literary sources in the north of Europe. It begins by studying various medical aspects of the late-medieval plague, stressing later epidemiological findings - such as the rapid adaptation of its surviving human hosts, the sharp decline in mortality rates, and its evolution as a disease of children. As a consequence of the disease's course over its first 100 years, doctors became the vanguard of a new intellectual optimism, claiming to have surpassed the ancients (Galen and Hippocrates) in the art of healing. The book argues that the Black Death, in its epidemiology and its cultural effects, differed within Europe.