The Black Death

Reflections in (& on) a Time of Plague

I'm a late medieval historian, so the Black Death is unavoidable in my line of work. I've actually always been fascinated by it, though: my undergraduate thesis was on art and literature in the fifty years or so after the Black Death (to be specific, on the iconography of Petrarch's Triumphs, an illustration from which is depicted at left) (source: Paris, Bib. nat., MS Fr. 12423, fol. 37v).

Given that, and the fact that I now teach an upper-level seminar called The Black Death, a few friends have asked if I have any insights into the current pandemic or reading recommendations for interested non-specialists. I recently talked to Abby Weingarten, a member of the Communications & Marketing team at New College, about some of those ideas (article link).

I'd like to begin by clarifying some terms. Most people have heard of the Black Death, and they might be able to place it in Europe in the mid-14th century (1347–52, to be precise). What you might not know is that the term Black Death was the first and deadliest wave in Europe of a global pandemic we now call the Second Plague Pandemic (the First Pandemic, also called the Plague of Justinian, was in the 6th–8th centuries AD/CE). The Second Pandemic—as scientists have now demonstrated using a couple of different types of genetic analysis—originated in Asia, ravaged the Middle East and Europe (where it is now called the Black Death), and remained endemic in those places until the end of the 18th century. All European outbreaks of plague from 1348 until the late 18th century, including the famous outbreaks of the 1650s and 1660s—were part of the Second Pandemic. (There was a Third Pandemic, too, which began in the 1850s and lasted into the 1950s; it was only stamped out by the rise of modern antibiotics. It was this pandemic in which microbiologist Alexandre Yersin identified the causative bacterium that now bears his name, Yersinia pestis, thereby providing some of the first hard evidence for modern germ theory.)

Below are some reading suggestions about plagues in history and the Black Death in particular. This is not remotely a comprehensive list, just a rough correlation of works that I have found useful with works I think others might like to read.

Medieval sources

Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester Medieval Sources, 1994). A collection of widely varied medieval texts written during and about the Black Death, all translated into English.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by Wayne Rebhorn. A classic collection of one hundred stories supposedly told over ten days by ten young people (the brigata) who have retreated to a villa outside Florence to escape the Black Death. The stories are wildly varied—some of them romantic, others obscene—and all stand in stark contrast to the brutal description of the plague given by Boccaccio in the introduction. Rebhorn has actually published two versions of his translation, the full text (Norton, 2013) and the Norton Critical Edition (2015), which presents about half of the full text along with framing scholarship.
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), The Triumphs, translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1962). Musings of the poet Petrarch (inventor of the sonnet!) on life, love, loss, and memory after the death of his beloved Laura in the Black Death.

Scholarship on the Black Death

Ole Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–53: The Complete History (2004). Not as complete a history as it claims (a mismatch for which the author apparently blames the publisher), but a "painstakingly comprehensive" history of the European pandemic.
Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (2008). Not actually about the Black Death, but a brilliant book about the intersections of trade, cookery, and medicine (see? it's relevant) in the medieval world.
Robert Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (1983). Problematic in many respects, but still probably the best accessible general overview of the Black Death in Europe, with a useful environmental focus. More readable than Benedictow.
Monica Green (ed.), Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death (2015). The best overview of current Black Death scholarship. Professor Green (@monicaMedHist) has also published a Guide for Teaching the History of the Black Death.
Elizabeth Lehfeldt (ed.), The Black Death: Problems in European Civilization (2005). A really useful collection of primary and secondary scholarship showing how historians' interpretations of the Black Death have changed over time. Out of print, but easily accessible secondhand.
Lester K. Little, "Plague Historians in Lab Coats," Past & Present 213.1 (2011). A fascinating analysis of how historians and scientists finally managed to prove the identity of the pathogen that caused the Black Death.
Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (1990). An accessible introduction to how medieval people thought about medicine.
Shona Kelly Wray, Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death (2009). A monograph based on careful archival research demonstrating how, despite all the sense of catastrophe and the derailing of society, many ordinary people during the Black Death just got on with things.

Also: Michael Hopkin, "Did the Black Death cause HIV Immunity in Europe?" (Nature, 2005). On the fascinating question of whether a genetic mutation that strengthens immunity to HIV may have been boosted by survival of the Black Death.

More generally on plague

Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994). A definitive account of epidemics in our time, by one of the first scientists to warn of the dangers of complacency.
Jonathan Heeney and Sven Friedemann, editors, Plagues (2017). A collection of essays arising from the 2014 Darwin College Lectures, this book contemplates plague as a concept, ranging over the spectrum of tragic consequences of different types of plagues, from infectious diseases to over-population and computer viruses.
William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976). A classic analysis of the relationships between people, disease, and their environment. Occasionally overblown, and not all his metaphors hold up, but still engaging and thought-provoking.
Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction (2012). A wide-ranging and (true to its title) concise introduction to the scientific, social, and cultural implications of epidemic disease, by a historian of 17th-century England.
Guenter Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown (2012). About the Third Plague Pandemic in the western United States: a sobering wake-up call for anyone who thought we had outgrown xenophobia and pogroms as responses to plague (see also: those who insist on calling COVID-19 the "Chinese virus" or the "Wuhan virus").
Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962 (2006). One of my favorite works of historical scholarship of all time. Snowden demonstrates brilliantly how how closely intertwined Italy's battle to eradicate malaria was with the environmental, medical, social and political landscapes of the early 20th century. In the words of one reviewer, the book "conceptualizes disease within a political landscape that includes socialists, liberals, feminists, and fascists."
Frank Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019). So recent I haven't even read it yet and presently out of stock at Amazon (I wonder why?), but I suspect it's great.

Fiction

[in order of publication]

Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Defoe's first-person account of the Great Plague of 1665 in London.
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death" (1822). A short story about a party in plague time; High Gothic fiction/horror.
Albert Camus, The Plague (1948). An existential post-war musing narrated by a doctor during an outbreak of plague in Algiers.
George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949). A post-apocalyptic science fiction novel that won the inaugural International Fantasy Award; based on Jack London's 1912 The Scarlet Plague. (Thanks to my colleague Paul Scudder for this tip.)
Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (1969). The first thriller I ever read about biological catastrophe. Remarkably prescient, and still gripping.
Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders (2002). An imagined first-person narrative of a village in 17th-century Derbyshire that shuts itself off to arrest the spread of the plague.
Connie Willis, Doomsday Book (2011). Historical fantasy that parallels a "flu" outbreak in near-future Oxford with time-travelling historians who get stuck in the Black Death; winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards.

Film

[in order of release date]

The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman's classic film about the Black Death (starring the recently-deceased Max von Sydow).
The Decameron (1971), Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptation of Boccaccio's story collection.
The Little Hours (2017), presently on Netflix: a recent indie film based on two rather obscene stories from the Decameron. Advice from one of my students: do not watch this with your parents or professors.

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