Life and death in the era of the Black Death. A man is paying a prostitute while others are burning clothes in the hope of stopping the spread of the infectious disease. Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.
A procession of bishops depicted in the fourteenth-century saint’s calendar. Episcopal prayers did not stop the Black Death. Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.
Bad news! The dead addressing the living, in a fifteenth-century manuscript. Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.
A mass for plague victims, as depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript. Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.
A fourteenth-century depiction of male anatomy with the ever-present reminder, at the bottom, of the shortness of life. Wellcome Library, London
Carrying and burying victims of the Black Death. Wellcome Library, London
A mass grave for victims of the Black Death is located at Charterhouse Square, London. The buildings are postmedieval. In the fourteenth century this was the site of a Carthusian monastery, and victims of the Black Death were buried in a mass grave, which is now underneath the grass. Anthony J. Gross
The intercessionary religious procession of Pope Gregory the Great in 590, as depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript, during the Black Death. This was the most immediate and common response to pandemic disease until recently. Wellcome Library, London
A sixteenth-century Petrarchan woodcut shows the Black Death as killing both humans and animals of many kinds as monks pray. The testimony to common impact of the Black Death on both animals and humans is biologically significant. Wellcome Library, London
Lancing of the buboes, the black welts that appeared around the armpits and groin of victims of the plague, in a fifteenth-century woodcut. The remedy had little therapeutic effect. Wellcome Library, London
Doctors making theriac from snakeskin. Theriac was considered the all-purpose cure in the fouteenth century for the plague and other serious diseases. ÖsterreichischeNationalBibliothek
Astronomers looking at the heavens. Fourteenth-century knowledge of astronomy was considerable. It was used by French astronomers to determine the astrological cause of the Black Death. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal
At Sedlec, in the Czech Republic, in the Cemetery Church of All Saints there is an ossuary (human bone depository) that contains thousands of relics of plague victims. In the late eighteenth century, a local woodcarver was given permission to create skeletal decorations from the ossuary deposits, resulting in a dramatic and little-known memorial to the Black Death. Sandra Norman, Florida Atlantic University
Passover plagues in a fifteenth-century Ashkanazi Haggadah. The ninth biblical plague is cattle disease and perhaps the origin of the Black Death. British Library
The burning of German Jews accused of poisoning wells and causing the Black Death. British Library
A 1492 depiction of the city of Strasbourg, where a massacre of Jews suspected to be responsible for the Black Death took place. British Library
Princess Joan left England with a musical introduction to Castilian culture—a Spanish minstrel—on her way to meet her fiance, Pedro of Castile. But the princess died in Bordeaux of the Black Death and never reached Spain or her prince. Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.
The Black Death forced an unprecedented exchange of fortunes. Shown above is Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster. After his death of the plague in 1361, the duke’s enormous estate passed to his surviving daughter, who was married to John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III. It became the foundation of John of Gaunt’s wealth and power. Crown Copyright, RCHME
The suffering of Job in a fifteenth-century manuscript. As a result of the Black Death, Job was a figure that late medieval people could identify with. British Library
The Dance of Death in a late-medieval manuscript. Unsurprisingly, this was a popular motif in art and literature following the Black Death. British Library
Knowing About the Black Death
A Critical Bibliography
HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
These are indispensable introductions to the political and social context in which the Black Death in England occurred: Maurice H. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1990); Stephen H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status, and Gender (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980); W. Mark Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy (London: Macmillan, 1977); Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Clifford J. Rogers, The Wars of Edward III (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 1999); Rodney H. Hilton, Bondsmen Made Free (New York: Methuen, 1977); Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1978); Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, 1999); Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999). The works by Prestwich, Rigby, and volume one by Sumption are particularly illuminating.
On literary, intellectual, and religious history two works originally published in 1933 remain important: G. R. Owst, Literature and Preaching in Medieval England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966); Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). In addition are three recent substantial works: Gordon Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Edward Grant, The Foundation of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Norman Kretzmann et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), is the best book on the subject and brilliantly written; Paul Binski, Medieval Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), is careful, learned, and insightful; Jean Delemeau, Sin and Fear (New York, 1991), is weird and verbose but interesting; Ann Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), has an extremely valuable introduction and notes; Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, eds., Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), is also useful, particularly the paper by Laura A. Smoller.
Works that argue for a strong impact of the Black Death on art and literature are Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1964); Daniel Williman, ed., The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth Century Plague (Binghamton: N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982), especially the major papers by Aldo S. Bernardo and Robert E. Lerner. Meiss famously argued that after the 1340s calamities there was a temporary reversion in north Italian art back to the quasi-abstraction of the twelfth century and away from the humanistic naturalism of Giotto. We do not know what would have happened in art and literature without the Black Death, but my counterfactual speculation is that the cultural development of the late fourteenth century would have been much the same without the plague.
On monastic life after the Black Death an instant classic was Barbara F. Harvey, Living and Dying in the Middle Ages (London: Oxford University Press, 1993), drawing heavily from the detailed records of Westminster Abbey. Remember how late medieval poets and satirists portrayed monks as fat and gluttonous and this hostile view was deprecated by generations of historians? It turns out that the poets and satirists were right.
On the Black Death in Italy, see William M Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena Under the Nine 1287–1355 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); John Henderson, “The Black Death in Florence,” in S. Bassett, ed., Death in Towns (Leicester: University Press, 1992); Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central
Italy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Ultimately, definitive knowledge of the biomedical and social components of the Black Death will not be achieved unless two vast research projects are systematically undertaken and come close to completion.
A. The historical human genetic map, going back 144,000 years, is nearing completion. Use of DNA studies is needed to determine the physiological and biochemical ingredients of the pandemic of the mid–fourteenth century, involving genetic analysis of human fossils and preferably cell tissue. Cell tissue is most likely to be found in bodies dug out of Arctic permafrost. From work done so far, an inherited genetic structure derived from the Black Death appears to have provided immunity from HIV/AIDS today.
B. A thorough combing has to be undertaken of the vast judicial, manorial, and urban records of fourteenth-century England to establish the trends in demographic, social, economic, and political change. Zvi Razi’s studies of the manorial court rolls in the 1980s and 1990s for population statistics (especially Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish, Cambridge University Press, 1980) showed what could be achieved by such microcosmic work. The vast English judicial records, royal and local, alone constitute enough labor for a generation of scholars: There is little incentive and reward system to undertake this gargantuan project. Learned foundations are no longer interested in this kind of long-term project.
GENERAL WORKS ON THE BLACK DEATH
Phillip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: Sutton, 1997, originally published in 1965). The text did not change in subsequent editions and printings; this edition added pictures. Highly readable and out of date.
Jean-Noel Biraben, Les Hommes et la Peste, 2 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), is a characteristic product of the French Annales school—verbose, unfocused, and now out of date. But information in the book on the Black Death in France, particularly Bordeaux, remains valuable.
Robert Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1983). Similar to Zeigler’s book but better informed; a useful synthesis. But Graham Twigg’s biomedical study, appearing a year later, gave new perspectives. Excellent bibliography. The text could have been much better.
David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. and with an introduction by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). The publication date is deceptive. The book’s three chapters were delivered as public lectures at the University of Maine in 1985 and published with very little change by Cohn, Herlihy’s student, at the urging of Herlihy’s devoted widow. The first chapter on “Historical Epidemiology and the Medical Problems” is worth close reading, although Herlihy’s dismissal of Twiggs’s book, published the year before his 1985 lectures, significantly derogates from the value of Herlihy’s argument.. The last two chapters of Herlihy’s book are puff pieces of speculative nature, unusual for Herlihy, and are of modest value. Cohn’s astute introduction is excellent.
Colin Platt, King Death: The Black Death and Its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England (Toronto: University Press, 1997; first published 1996). As in all of Platt’s writings, the archeological knowledge is impressive and the selection of pictures very good. The book is mainly about the social and economic impact of the Black Death and relies on recent research, which is, however, fragmentary and superficial in relation to the totality of unpublished (and unstudied) manuscript sources.
JEWS
For a short account from a secular point of view and based on all the recent scholarship, see Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews (London: Fontanta, 1996). Major detailed works are Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd. ed., vols. 8–10 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971–73), immensely learned but almost unreadable; Solomon D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–93), verbose but fascinating; Simon M. Dubnow, A History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times (New York: KATV, 1975; originally published in Yiddish, 1920), a classic not yet superseded; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), murky but important; Stephen Sharot, Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), brilliant and incisive. No one can seriously involve himself in medieval Jewish history without reading a sample of books by two great Hebrew University scholars: Yitzhak F. Baer, Galut (Lantham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988; originally published in Hebrew, 1974); Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorset, 1987, originally published in Hebrew, 1947). Among Gentiles who have written on Christian anti-Semitism, a substantial genre of its own, the best book remains Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970). The volumes on the Middle Ages in Heinrich Graetz’s classic eight-volume History of the Jews, originally published in German in the 1870s, of which there are many editions and translations (the Yiddish translation is much better than the English, not surprisingly), are still very much worth reading. There was nothing wrong with Graetz’s medieval research: It is his ethnic chauvinism and implacable hostility toward the Catholic Church that is problematic.
SPECIALIZED STUDIES ON THE BLACK DEATH
Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley, eds., The Black Death in England (Stamford, U.K.: Paul Watkins, 1995). A general introduction by Jeremy Goldberg—inconclusive but suggestive and worthy of perusal—followed by Mark Ormrod, the learned historian of the reign of Edward III, on “Government in England after the Black Death.” Anything Ormrod writes on fourteenth-century England merits careful consideration. But Ormrod’s belief that the crown abandoned control over the legal system is unconvincing. Compare N. F. Cantor, Imagining the Law (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death: A Transformation of Governance and Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Palmer assiduously reads court records, and what he has to say therefore merits close consideration. He argues just the opposite of what Ormrod claims. Palmer believes that the disorder attendant on the Black Death drove the royal government to increase central control of law and administration, using parliamentary statutes. The problem of the legal and political consequences of the Black Death may derive from the intrinsic nature of medieval public operations: Both ambitious efforts at central control and laxity and decentralization in practice happened at the same time.
Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994), a collection of source material, well translated with extensive notes. There are too many narrative and rhetorical selections as compared to documentary sources.
BIOMEDICAL ASPECTS
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1998; originally published in 1976, new preface, 1998). The University of Chicago’s intrepid and resourceful world historian stirred up great interest in biomedical history with this lively pioneering work that inspired a younger generation of historians to pursue the social history of pandemics. McNeill thought the Mongols, their migrations and conquests, were a key to plague history; there may be something in that.
Carol Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (London: Sutton, 1997, first published in 1996). This is a sober and careful discussion, a first-rate piece of historical reconstruction. Epidemics and Ideas, T. Ranger and P. Slack, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), contains some interesting perspectives and useful information.
Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London: Batsford, 1984). This is the most important book, by a British zoologist, ever published on the biomedical history of the Black Death. I cannot see how anyone who has read this book carefully can persist in believing that the Black Death was exclusively bubonic plague. How much it was anthrax, as Twigg believed, is moot, but it is likely that anthrax or some similar murrain (cattle disease) was involved.
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution (Lond
on: Phoenix, 1996, originally published in 1993). Infectious diseases as well as human life came from outer space. Fred Hoyle of Cambridge is one of the world’s leading astrophysicists, a great scientist.
Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Human Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Davies is a theoretical physicist and the recipient of the 1995 Templeton Prize for science writing; a serious writer, not a crank. He also asserts that infectious diseases and human life came from outer space.
Paul W. Ewald, Evolution of Infectious Disease (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The distinguished American biologist establishes conclusively the origin of major infectious diseases in Africa. This book is difficult but important.
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