Researchers from the University of Tuebingen in Germany are uncovering more evidence that is linking the Black Death with earlier plagues.
The Black Death And The Future Of Medicine
December 9, 2012 By
This paper will specifically focus on the effects of the Black Death on medicine and medical practice in Europe. Its purpose is to investigate the Black Death’s influence on medicine, especially with regard to learned medicine and surgery.
Hot Holiday Reads!
November 23, 2012 By
Put down those turkey left-overs and check out some of these hot holiday reads!
Modelling Population and Resource Scarcity in Fourteenth-century England
October 26, 2012 By
Hallam argues that the steady population rise of the 12th and 13th centuries may not have been the main cause of the crisis of the 14th century. First, unprecedented harvest failures and animal diseases between 1315 and 1322 had significant adverse effects on peasant welfare.
Technological Change in Medieval England: A Critique of the Neo-Malthusian Argument
October 13, 2012 By
The last two sections will address this issue by dividing the material into two periods preceding and following the great epidemic. The interpretation that will be provided is heavily indebted to Brenner.
The Black Death in Medieval India: a Historical Mystery
October 9, 2012 By
Why did a pestilence that had such an impact on one part of the world go unmentioned in another part of the world?
The Black Death – lecture by Sir Richard J. Evans
October 8, 2012 By
In this series of six lectures I want to look at some of the great diseases and their relationship to human history.
Epidemic Trade
September 18, 2012 By
This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the intensity of medieval trade flows between 1346 and 1351
Anthropologist compares medieval lives, pre- and post-Black Death
September 6, 2012 By
‘The survivors were either tremendously lucky or there was something about them that made them better able to resist the Black Death or mount a really strong immune response to disease’
The Lived Experience of the Black Death
August 29, 2012 By
To appreciate the importance of the biological effects of disease on a society’s lived experience, it can be useful to look at modern examples. Polio provides an excellent example. Children who survive an infection of polio – and escape the neurological incapacitation that can result in disability up to paraplegia – have a fifty percent chance of suffering the similar effects of post-polio syndrome later in life.
Living on the Edge: A Study on Cultural Memory in Narratives from Medieval English Literature Before and After the Black Death
August 26, 2012 By
One of the interesting questions that springs from all this chaos is in what way did the outbreak affect the mentality of fourteenth-century society and, if affected, how does this show?
Agricultural wage labour in fifteenth-century England
August 22, 2012 By
In the period when agriculture dominated almost every aspect of daily life, the lords and wealthy peasants relied on paid labourers for farming business, yardlanders hired labourers to work with them, whilst moderate and landless villagers worked for hire. Agrarian wage labour is a window on the economy as well as on agricultural society.
Labor Markets After the Black Death: Landlord Collusion and the Imposition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East
August 19, 2012 By
The differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods.
The Dance of the Black Death
August 17, 2012 By
‘One by one, we become the mistress of Death. Extending his bony grip, he pulls us into his fleshless, decayed frame and begins whirling us around in a morbid dance of fatal seduction. We are Death’s partner in the danse macabre.’
Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa
August 15, 2012 By
On the basis of a 14th-century account by the Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, the Black Death is widely believed to have reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack.
Epidemics, Pandemics, and the Doomsday Scenario
August 12, 2012 By
For centuries in Christian society people have made direct connections between the outbreak of epidemic disease and Doomsday.
The effect of sex on risk of mortality during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349-1350
August 12, 2012 By
The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Black Death was similarly selective with respect to biological sex-that is, did either sex face an elevated risk during the epidemic or were men and women at equal risk of dying?
Plague And Changes In Medieval European Society And Economy In The 14th And 15th Centuries
August 5, 2012 By
Standards of hygiene in the Middle Ages appeared high enough to prevent diseases as medieval Europeans, contrary to popular beliefs, bathed quite often. However, contact with domestic animals, which were frequently kept in the part of the house reserved for human activity, exposed people to animal-related diseases passed to humans via insects.
Review: Black Death
July 30, 2012 By
Black Death bills itself as a “Journey into Hell” and the film does a good job of portraying a dark and fearful world, where death is omnipresent.
Vilification of Identity and the Exilic Narrative: The Illustrated Pied Piper Story
July 22, 2012 By
This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a totla metaphor for the “journey of life”.
‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?’: The First Bubonic Plague Pandemic According to Syriac Sources
July 15, 2012 By
This includes information about the geographical spread and extent of the initial outbreak in the time of Justinian (541–543), the chronology of later outbreaks, the pathology of the disease, its occurrence among animals…
High Throughput, Multiplexed Pathogen Detection Authenticates Plague Waves in Medieval Venice, Italy
July 10, 2012 By
Historical records suggest that multiple burial sites from the 14th–16th centuries in Venice, Italy, were used during the Black Death and subsequent plague epidemics.
The Medievalist and the Microbiologist: How Plague and Leprosy Have Opened Up New Perspectives on the History of Health
July 7, 2012 By
Monica Green, known as ‘the foremost authority on medicine in the Middle Ages,’ examines how her field has changed in recent years.
Requiem For a Lost Age
June 24, 2012 By
Conventional wisdom said medieval Christian graves – the plain remains of the pious – held little interest for archaeologists. Now cemetery excavations have revealed an extraordinary world of fear, superstition, care and mourning. Roberta Gilchrist reports on a major new study.
BLACK DEATH: The Causes and Effects of a Pandemic
June 22, 2012 By
It requires an enormous burden of proof for any microscopic organism to be held responsible for killing roughly 30-40 percent of the population of Europe, or an estimated 17 to 28 million people from 1347-1352. Since the isolation and description of Yersinia pestis at the end of the “golden age” of microbiology in 1894, by the Swiss-French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, it is widely held that the small bacterium was responsible for the Black Death and several more pandemics that followed in Europe and Asia.
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