“People lived close to the inexplicable. the flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and fissures of an earthquake or the setting afire of a tree by lightning, the supernatural was close at hand.”

—Barbara W. Tuchman, from A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, 1978.