Plague Mask Players has specialized in twists on Shakespeare, a popular but often misguided strategy to modernize the Bard that can wind up undermining the text. Not so with this young company, whose ...

From the Black Death to the Present. “A wide-brimmed hat could defend the head, and a mask with a protruding beak extending from the nose could carry aromatic herbs that would protect the wearer ...

Even then, masking was controversial, notes Winston Black, a medieval medicine and religion historian at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. “Our earliest evidence of plague masks already ...