We naturally tend to focus on death in historical accounts of the bubonic plague. There was, after all, rather a lot of it about. But while somewhere between a third and two-thirds of Europe’s population was wiped out by the Black Death, it was possible to fall sick (“with bubons and all”, as our arts editor put it this week) and survive. Researchers recently uncovered a list made by the monks of Ramsey Abbey in what is now Cambridgeshire, detailing which of the local peasants had been off sick from work with the plague. It’s one of the few documents in existence that can help us understand how much time-off people needed to recover.

We’ve got another sad history story here about Queen Elizabeth I’s refusal to go to bed during her dying days. The legendarily stubborn monarch remained seated on cushions for six days as she neared the end of her life in March 1603, despite entreaties from courtiers to retire. This, in a way, was a fitting end to a reign “built on the pursuit of control, sustained through sacrifice and marked by isolation”.

It’s a surprise and a shame that Green Party leader Zack Polanski didn’t vote in the recent local council elections. It turns out that his 440 councillors across the country can do quite a lot to help with environmental work, so his support might have been welcomed. Even though climate policy flows from Westminster, local government initiatives, from citizens’ councils to food waste drives do make a genuine difference.

Our series on the unsung heroes of science has this week turned its spotlight on social psychologist Carolyn Wood Sherif, whose pioneering work was largely credited to her more famous collaborator (and husband) Muzafer Sherif. Rejected by her own field, Wood Sherif branched out in a different direction and ended up becoming a founding figure in an entirely new subdiscipline: feminist psychology.

Also this week, literature experts sift through the International Booker shortlist, a statistics expert reverse engineers the worst voting scandal in Eurovision history and sports nutritionists give us the essentials on energy gels.

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