Plague And Changes In Medieval European Society And Economy In The 14th And 15th Centuries
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
The cost of enclosure and the benefits of convertible husbandry among peasant holdings in medieval England
The present paper will attempt to address these issues and outline the attitudes of the peasantry in regard to the potential of enclosing land and adopting convertible husbandry.
From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages
Aberth writes in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, both in his lively, readable style aimed at the nonspecialist and in his antiheroic, almost romantic portrayal of late medieval miseries.
A historiographical and artistic survey of confraternities from the later Middle Ages to the early Renaissance
Overall, the analysis will allow for a closer examination of not just the culture of a particular confraternity, but also the cultural values, ideals, and practices of an entire community in one period of time. Furthermore, the examination of confraternal artwork will prove important, as it will demonstrate the unique power of confraternities.
“What We Are, So You Shall Be”: Preparation for Death in the Late Middle Ages
It is tempting to explain the late medieval attitude toward death as a direct result of the Black Death, which caused massive loss of life and brought about a new awareness of the fact that death could come at any time. While this generalization is not completely false, there are several issues of timing. The fear of sudden death was not new.
The Origin of Quarantine
A similar strategy was used in the busy Mediterranean sea- port of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia). After a visitation of the black death, the city’s chief physician, Jacob of Padua, advised establishing a place outside the city walls for treatment of ill townspeople and outsiders who came to town seeking a cure. The impetus for these recommendations was an early contagion theory, which promoted separation of healthy persons from those who were sick.
The concept of quarantine in history: from plague to SARS
The concept of ‘quarantine’ is radically embedded in local and global health practices and culture, attracting heightened interest during episodes of perceived or actual epidemics. The term, however, evokes a variety of emotions, such as fear, resentment, acceptance, curiosity and perplexity, reactions often to be associated with a lack of knowledge about the origins, meaning, and rel- evance of quarantine itself.
Age in medieval plagues and pandemics: Dances of Death or Pearson’s bridge of life?
Death has long obsessed humanity. In times of plague and pandemic even more so. Medieval man saw four horsemen of the apocalypse, and of them, Death by disease was gathering the greatest harvest. How randomly did he gather? And how random is the death toll in later pandemics?James Hanley and Elizabeth Turner look at Karl Pearson’s visualisations of mortality.
Public Health and the Pre-Modern City: A Research Agenda
Medieval cities are often viewed as environmental accidents waiting to happen. ‘The visual virtues of medieval towns’, reckons one textbook, ‘were grimly offset by the dismal ineptitude of public health services and municipal control over the environment … Squalor, dirt, discomfort and disease were the accepted lot of medieval man.’
The Temporal Dynamics of the Fourteenth-Century Black Death: New Evidence from English Ecclesiastical Records
A sample of 235 deaths from the bishop’s register of Coventry and Lichfield, the only English register to list both date of death and date of institution, shows that the Black Death swept through local areas much more rapidly than has previously been thought.
The Economic Consequences of the Black Death
Great epidemics mark the agricultural world of the past; from Neolithic times onwards. The formation of much denser societies with respect to those of hunters and gatherers, and daily contact with domestic animals are at the origins of serious epidemic infections which have accompanied humans for 10,000 years.
Millstones for Medieval Manors
Richard Holt recently reminded us that mills were at the forefront of medieval technology and argued persuasively that windmills may have been invented in late twelfth-century England.
Genetic Investigations into the Black Death
This dissertation discusses molecular analyses of dental and skeletal material from victims of the Black Death with the goal of both identifying and describing the evolutionary history of the causative agent of the pandemic.
The Ars Moriendi: An examination, translation, and collation of the manuscripts of the shorter Latin version
The Ars Moriendi is a Mediaeval Christian death manual that appeared around the middle of the fifteenth century. Though no-one is certain who the author was, there is no doubt that Jean Gerson was the major inspiration through his Opusculum Tripartitum.
Sex Differentials in Frailty in Medieval England
The sample used for this study comes from the East Smithfield Black Death cemetery in London. The benefit of using this cemetery is that most, if not all, individuals interred in East Smithfield died from the same cause within a very short period of time.
Dancing with the Dance of the Dead : cemetery of the Innocents and the ramifications of the Macabre
Glaring at us from the pages of illuminated manuscripts, royal sepulchers, and frescoes of Late Medieval churches and cemeteries, macabre cadavers, with their gaping, vermin-infested torsos, emaciated bodies, and grimacing faces, shock and repel.
The Paleodemography of the Black Death 1347-1351
The Black Death of 1347-50 has fascinated both researchers and lay people for over six hundred years1. The medieval epidemic had profound consequences both culturally and demographically and it did much to shape human history.