麻豆传媒AV

With every week that passed, more people died, and the surviving ISU students had to decide what to do. Should they close the city gates? Should they quarantine the sick? Should the secret sect of flagellants finally go public?

ISU students had the opportunity to relive a deadly episode of history as they studied the Black Death in HIST 4479: History of Disease, Medicine, and Society in Spring 2026. Led by Dr. Meghan Woolley, students adopted medieval identities and spent several weeks roleplaying their reactions to an outbreak of the plague in fourteenth-century Norwich, England.

"Most of what I have learned about the Black Death so far comes from the readings throughout the semester, not just the game," one student reported. "However, the game did something that the readings alone couldn't do. It created a connection to choices made during the Black Plague for students in the modern age. Instead of reading about the struggles of councilmen of that time, we became the councilmen."

As the students settled into their roles, surprising alliances and feuds emerged. For example, the church and the tradesmen formed an unlikely partnership after the tradesmen offered to donate money to the church to build a new hospital. In return, they sought the church's support in voting against banning "dirty" trades from the city. Meanwhile, the wool merchants of Norwich became staunch enemies of the tradesmen after the latter disparaged the urine used in the wool-manufacturing process.

"Historians reconstruct outcomes with the benefit of hindsight, but the people living through the Black Death did not know how it would end or what would work," another student in the class noted. "Playing a role that required me to think in real time, under pressure, made me more sympathetic to the genuine difficulty of the choices medieval city-dwellers faced, and more suspicious of retrospective judgments about what 'should have' been done."

Dr. Woolley designed the interactive student experience using materials from Reacting to the Past, an award-winning series of educational roleplaying games published by the University of North Carolina Press.

"I was so impressed with the way the class dove into the game," Dr. Woolley said. "I've never quite seen this level of collaboration before: students were strategizing together in our class Slack, passing notes, whispering together, workshopping their proposals, and sticking around after class to plan as a team. Even though about two thirds of our version of medieval Norwich did succumb to the plague, I thought it was a massive success in working together and connecting to the past."