Norman
F. Cantor.
In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World
it Made.
New York: The Free
Press, 2001.
245pp.
Hardback, ISBN
0684857359.
Publisher's
recommended price $25.00
Much of
what we know
about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the
fourteenth
century, is wrong. The details of the plague etched in the minds of
terrified
schoolchildren - the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the
final,
awful end by respiratory failure - are more or less accurate. But what
the plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a
haze
of myths.
In
the Wake
of the Plague presents a microcosmic view of the Plague in England
(and on the Continent), telling the stories of the men and women of the
fourteenth century, from peasant to priest, and from merchant to king.
Cantor introduces a fascinating cast of characters. We meet, among
others,
fifteen-year-old Princess Joan of England, on her way to Spain to marry
a Castilian prince; Thomas of Birmingham, abbot of Halesowen,
responsible
for his abbey as a CEO is for his business in a desperate time; and the
once-prominent landowner John le Strange, who sees the Black Death tear
away his family's lands and then its very name as it washes, unchecked,
over Europe in wave after wave.
Cantor
argues
that despite the devastation that made the Plague so terrifying, the
disease
that killed more than forty percent of Europe's population had some
beneficial
results. The literal demise of the old order meant that new, more
scientific
thinking increasingly prevailed where church dogma had once reigned
supreme.
In effect, the Black Death heralded an intellectual revolution. There
was
also an explosion of art: tapestries became popular as window
protection
against the supposedly airborne virus, and a great number of painters
responded
to the Plague. Finally, the Black Death marked an economic sea change:
the onset of what Cantor refers to as turbocapitalism; the peasants who
survived the Plague thrived, creating Europe's first class of
independent
farmers.
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