The Black Death was a pandemic disease that spread throughout Europe, Asia and northern Africa in the mid-fourteenth century. This bubonic plague had a devastating effect on the population of Eurasia, and fundamentally changed the economic and social conditions of many countries. This section offers a wide range of resources about the Black Death, including videos, articles and books about how the disease, including its causes, spread and effects on medieval society.
Videos on the Black Death
The Black Death: A Personal History – lecture by John Hatcher, Cambridge University history professor , on the challenges of writing and researching his book The Black Death: A Personal History.
How the Black Death Affected Painters and Art History – Images of death, tortured souls, and the macabre art produced during the Middle Ages that was highly influenced by the horrors of Black Death.
Mystery of the Black Death – clips from the BBC programme Timewatch
Podcasts
The Black Death – a plague on all our houses – from the BBC radio series In Our Time, a discussion of the plague by historians Miri Rubin of the University of London; Samuel Cohn of the University of Glasgow; Paul Binski of the University of Cambridge (45 minutes)
Articles on the Black Death
The Making of a Pandemic: Bubonic Plague in the 14th Century
Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History
Selectivity of Black Death mortality with respect to preexisting health
The Black Death: End of a Paradigm
The Black Death and its Effect on Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Art
Jewish Treatises on the Black Death (1350-1500): A Preliminary Study
Disaster and Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe
Molecular identification by ‘‘suicide PCR’’ of Yersinia pestis as the agent of Medieval Black Death
The Black Death: Catastrophe or New Start?
Microbes and Markets: Was the Black Death an Economic Revolution?
Before and after the Black Death: money, prices, and wages in fourteenth-century England
The Great Transformation? David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West
The Black Death and Property Rights
Mortality, gender, and the plague of 1361–2 on the estate of the bishop of Winchester
New Directions in the Study of Religious Responses to the Black Death
The Black Death and the origins of the ‘Great Divergence’ across Europe, 1300–1600
How the West ’Invented’ Fertility Restriction
The eleven plagues of Edinburgh
The epidemic of Justinian (AD 542): a prelude to the Middle Ages
Other Recent Articles on the Black Death
Christopher Catling, “The chances of surviving the Black Death explained,” Current Archaeology, Vol. 217 (2008)
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “The Black Death tragedy, and transformation,” The Renaissance World. ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York, 2007)
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past and Present, Vol.196:1 (2007)
John M. Theilmann and Frances Cate, “A plague of plagues: the problem of plague diagnosis in medieval England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol.37:3 (2007)
Dagmar Gottschall, “Conrad of Megenberg and the causes of the plague: a Latin treatise on the Black Death composed ca. 1350 for the papal court in Avignon,” La Vie culturelle, intellectuelle et scientifique à la cour des papes d’Avignon. ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Turnhout, 2006)
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “Triumph over plague: culture and memory after the black death,” Care for the Here and the Hereafter: Memoria, Art and Ritual in the Middle Ages. ed. Truus van Bueren and Andrea van Leerdam (Brepols, 2005)
Rebecca L. Gowland and Andrew T. Chamberlain, “Detecting plague: palaeodemographic characterisation of a catastrophic death assemblage,” Antiquity: A Quarterly Review of Archaeology, Vol. 79:303 (2005)
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. “The Black Death the end of a paradigm,” Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times, ed. Joseph Canning (Aldershot, 2004)
Elizabeth Casteen, “John of Rupescissa’s letter Reverendissime pater (1350) in the aftermath of the Black Death,” Franciscana: Bollettino della Società internazionale di studi francescani, Vol. 6 (2004)
Recent Books on the Black Death
The Black Death : the great mortality of 1348-1350 ; a brief history with documents, by John Aberth
The Black death, 1346-1353 : the complete history, by Ole J. Benedictow
The Black Death : a personal history, by John Hatcher
The Black death transformed : disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe, by Samuel K. Cohn
A History of the Black death in Ireland, by Maria Kelly
The great dying : the black death in Dublin, by Maria Kelly
Communities and crisis : Bologna during the Black Death, by Shona Kelly Wray
The scourging angel : the black death in the British Isles, by Benedict Gummer
Scotland’s Black Death : the foul death of the English, by Karen Jillings
The Black Death cemetery, East Smithfield, London, by Ian Grainger
The Black Death in Egypt and England : a comparative study, by Stuart J. Borsch
The great mortality : an intimate history of the Black Death, by John Kelly
Living with the Black Death, edited by Lars Bisgaard and Leif Søndergaard
Pestilential complexities : understanding medieval plague, by Vivian Nutton
Other Resources
The Middle Ages: The Black Death – online guide by Professor Skip Knox of Boise State University
BBC: Black Death – from their British History in Depth website
The Black Death and the Jews 1348-1349 CE – from the Jewish History Sourcebook
Lesson Plans for Grade School Students:
- The Black Death
- Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down
- Global Pandemics: the Black Death and Spanish Flu
- The Black Death: European Plague in the Middle Ages
The Black Death a Bubonic Plague – Grade 6 project video uploaded to Youtube
Movie: Black Death – released in 2010 and starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne
Buy a cute little Black Death!
