During the Middle Ages in Europe, when the Black Plague was devastating the continent, was there any movement to go back to traditional paganism as a way to avoid the disease? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

During the Middle Ages in Europe, when the Black Plague was devastating the continent, was there any movement to go back to traditional paganism as a way to avoid the disease?

by DangWhatAStory

I know that many medieval people became extremely religious and devout to their Christian faith in order to avoid the plague (since they thought that God was punishing Europe for their sins).

However, did the opposite ever occur? Did anyone in Medieval Europe thought that the pagan Gods were punishing the people for converting away from their traditional beliefs?

Dacder

I can't answer about paganism per se, however, in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote that in Florence, "With so much affliction and misery, all reverence for the laws, both of God and of man, fell apart and dissolved, because the ministers...were either dead or ill like everyone else".

There is no mention of any sort of paganism gaining even the slightest bit of traction in Florence however, just that people stopped obeying the laws of god.

http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/decameronintro.asp