Samuel
K. Cohn, Jr.
The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in
Early
Renaissance Europe.
London: Arnold, 2002.
Publisher's
recommended price
Hardback ISBN 0340706465, £50.00
Paperback ISBN 0340706473, £12.99
The Black
Death in
Europe, from its arrival in 1347-52 through successive waves into the
early
modern period, has been seriously misunderstood. It is clear from the
compelling
evidence presented in this revolutionary account that the Black Death
was
almost any disease other than the rat-based bubonic plague whose
bacillus
was discovered in 1894. Since the late nineteenth century, the rat and
flea have stood wrongly accused as the agents of transmission and
historians
and scientists have uncritically imposed the epidemiology of modern
plague
on the past.
Unshackled
from
this misconception, The Black Death Transformed turns to its
subject
afresh, using sources spread across a huge geographical tract, from
Lisbon
to Uzbekistan, Sicily to Scotland: more than 40,000 death documents
(from
last wills and testaments to the earliest surviving burial records),
over
400 chronicles, 250 plague tracts, 50 saints' lives, merchant letters
and
much more. These sources confirm the terror of the medieval plague, the
rapidity of its spread (unlike modern plague), and the utter
despondency
left in the wake of its first strike. But they also point to
significant
differences between medieval and modern plague, none more significant
than
the ability of humans to acquire natural immunity to the former but not
the latter.
Over
its first
hundred years, adaptation to the new microbial plague enemy came with
striking
speed and success. In place of despondency came a new sense of
confidence.
From God and the stars, contemporaries turned to cures and socially
grounded
explanations. And in this context the Renaissance found a foothold and
climbed with assurance - not only in Florence but in places as far
removed
from the supposed centres of Renaissance culture as Danzig. Such a
major
cultural and psychological change centred, this study argues, on the
particular
character of the disease - the swiftness with which Europeans adapted
to
their new bacillus (whatever it might have been).
Contents:
Part
I: The Middle Ages confront the Twentieth Century: Scientists square
the
circle; The conquest of plague; Historians square the circle. Part II:
The Black Death: Signs and Symptoms: Signs, chronicles, plague tracts
and
saints' lives; Symptoms. Part III: The Black Death: Epidemiology:
Chroniclers
and doctors; Climate; Cycles and Trends; Conclusion - Culture and
Psychology;
Appendix 1: Miraculous Plague Cures; Appendix II: List of Chronicles,
annales
and calenders; Appendix II: Plague tracts from Sudhoff.
Key
Features:
*
Transforms
our understanding of the Black Death
*
Argues
for
a wholly new epidemiology
*
Reassesses
the cultural impact of the disease
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