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The Black Death
This series provides texts central to medieval studies courses and focuses upon the diverse cultural, social and political conditions that affected the functioning of all levels of medieval society. Translations are accompanied by introductory and explanatory material and each volume includes a comprehensive guide to the sources' interpretation, including discussion of critical linguistic problems and an assessment of recent research on the topics covered.
From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This source book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349.
Rosemary Horrox surveys contemporary attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind. Moralists all had their particular targets for criticism. However, this emphasis on divine chastisement did not preclude attempts to explain the plague in medical or scientific terms. Also, there was a widespread belief that human agencies had been involved, and such scapegoats as foreigners, the poor and Jews were all accused of poisoning wells. The final section of the book charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy.
From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This source book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349.
Rosemary Horrox surveys contemporary attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind. Moralists all had their particular targets for criticism. However, this emphasis on divine chastisement did not preclude attempts to explain the plague in medical or scientific terms. Also, there was a widespread belief that human agencies had been involved, and such scapegoats as foreigners, the poor and Jews were all accused of poisoning wells. The final section of the book charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy.
384 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 1994
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February 24, 2026
“Why pretend? We are alone indeed.... How transient and arrogant an animal is man! How shallow the foundations on which he rears his towers! You see how our band of friends has dwindled. Look, even as we speak we too are slipping away, vanishing like shadows. One minute someone hears that another has gone, the next he is following in his footsteps.”
From a letter Petrarch wrote to a friend
This book is a marvelous resource for anyone interested in learning about the black plague as reported in Europe. I wasn't aware just how much documentation was occurring at the height of the plague: public records, sermons, letters, journals; all of which makes for a fascinating though harrowing look into one of the deadliest epidemics in human history.
Human reaction recorded here varies, but most were, expectedly, rooted in fear of death, and the limitations of medieval science in understanding and treating illness, as well as religious dogma. Where everyone one knew was dead or dying, this happening after a great famine that killed millions, wars, earthquakes, the world as one knows must feel like it's coming to an end, and it's both horrifying and touching reading these accounts. From the flagellants who went around brutalizing their own bodies with whips and calling for public repentance to those who simply barricaded themselves hoping the illness wouldn't reach them even though eventually it did.
February 21, 2024
Horrox, who might have one of the coolest names I've ever found when it comes to researchers, has compiled a fascinating collection of texts centered on the Black Death. Reading them in the wake of the COVID 19 outbreak, and having lived through the hysteria and the horror that accompanied it, these texts don't seem quite as dramatic as they might have pre-pandemic. People are people, and our reactions too major, scary plagues hasn't necessarily changed that much in the past few hundred years.
An excellent sourcebook for anyone looking for texts from the time, I'm not sure that this would appeal to the general reader, or that it's meant to. This is a survey of texts, selected because they show a broad swath of reactions, whether that reaction is an assertion that snakes falling from the sky lead to the plague, or account after account of the deaths of peasant farmers and the monotonous work of figuring out who inherited their meager possessions.
An excellent sourcebook for anyone looking for texts from the time, I'm not sure that this would appeal to the general reader, or that it's meant to. This is a survey of texts, selected because they show a broad swath of reactions, whether that reaction is an assertion that snakes falling from the sky lead to the plague, or account after account of the deaths of peasant farmers and the monotonous work of figuring out who inherited their meager possessions.
July 7, 2024
This is a source book rather than a narrative account of the Black Death, so it's something of a supplement to the proliferation of other monographs and studies which have been published over the course of the last two centuries. Before modern archaeology, the varied surviving literary accounts included herein constituted the main sources of information we had about the epidemic, which may have wiped out 40% of the population of the Eurasian continent. Admittedly, we have learned a great deal more from the physical evidence, including the DNA sequencing of the bacterial disease itself. Many questions remain unanswered, however, so the scholarly discourse on the disease itself and its historical significance will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
As the editor notes, many of the sources included address the Black Death in England, and most were written by clergy, the most literate class, so they tend to skew toward one particular perspective. The volume is well organized, which makes it easy to locate the desired sources. It's divided into three primary topics: 1) Narrative Accounts, 2) Explanations and Responses, and 3) Consequences. The first part is divided into narratives from continental Europe and the British Isles; the second part into sections concerning religious explanations, "scientific" explanations, and "human agency" (i.e., specifically claims of well-poisoning, by Jews but also other marginalized and impoverished groups); and the third section into the impact of the plague and consequences.
Most of the selections are short, but informative. Their sources are also included, as a brief discussion on the texts, as there are some substantial translation and textual issues, which the author likewise addresses. I read quite a lot on this topic, but haven't encountered this particular source book previously. Overall, it was a good selection of both well-known and more obscure authors, and it offers a fairly balanced presentation of viewpoints and schools of thought regarding this far-reaching historical event, which, considering what has been occurring in our own world over the past several years, we have now only recently begun to personally appreciate.
I will include some additional information from previous reviews of books concerning this timely topic.
The Black Death is something of a misnomer - and the origins of the term are still somewhat disputed - though it may have originated with Belgian astronomer Simon de Couvin in a poem which attributed the plague to a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. In this context, it generally refers to one of several bubonic plague pandemics which have broken out on the Eurasian continent over at least the last two thousand years, but this one had the distinction of being one of the most lethal epidemics in human history. The true scale of the devastation will never be known, but modern estimates suggest that as many as fifty million people - anywhere from 40-50% of the total population of Europe, perished in a period of just about five years.
What we now know is that the disease was caused by a bacterium - not a virus - now termed Yersinia pestis, named after the Swiss-French bacteriologist from the Pasteur Institute who discovered it, Alexandre Yersin, first identifying it in 1894 during yet another plague epidemic in Hong Kong. It is a member of the genus known as Pasteurella pestis, a family of gram-negative, non-motile coccobacillus (short rod) bacteria.
The origin of the disease is disputed, but its far-reaching consequences are not. In short, this disease is a genius: it's far smarter than we are. Its uncanny ability to adapt to new surroundings and to mutate to escape the body's natural defenses render it a severe threat, even in the modern world, as antibiotic-resistant strains have been identified. It's also self-destructive, akin to a suicide bomber - that it, it spreads through populations so rapidly and kills so many so quickly that it burns itself out in due course, only to lie dormant again in populations, intermittently to rear its ugly head in periodic subsequent outbreaks.
This terrible disease appears to have evolved specifically to kill: that is its specific biological function. It appears to serve as something of a rapid-response check on exploding rodent populations among which it remains endemic, which may be triggered especially in response to changing environmental conditions. It periodically sweeps through and wipes out vast numbers when the population passes a tipping point, throwing nature out of balance, thus leaving only a few immune survivors to repopulate. New mutated strains eventually arise in place of the old one, however, to infect new, genetically-immune generations, with the intent of preventing future overpopulation.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Black Death plague wasn't carried by rats, but by their fleas: the bacterium incubates in the guts of infected Oriental rat fleas, the primary vectors, until it blocks their digestive tracts, prohibiting them from feeding. As a result, the fleas regurgitate the bacterium out of their digestive tracts to clear the blockage, often directly into the wounds of the mammals they bite. The bacterium then incubates in the new host, traveling throughout the body via the lymph system, concentrating in lymph notes, resulting in the characteristic swollen lymph nodes, most notably in the groin and under the arms and jaw. Thus, the bacteria did not evolve to directly infect humans; they essentially became collateral damage once the rodent populations the fleas fed on died, forcing them to turn to new and unfamiliar hosts... with devastating consequences.
Modern genetic analysis traces Y. pestis to the Tian Shan mountains, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. The bacterium has been dated to about 2,600 years ago. It remains endemic in the marmot population of the great steppes of central Asia, but also in North India, and now even the western United States, although in the latter case, the disease was artificially introduced. Some research suggests that the bubonic plague first infected human populations in the early Bronze Age. It is even attested in an ancient Swedish tomb dating to about 3000 BC. The symptoms of the disease were first described in a fragment of Rufus of Ephesus, preserved in the later works of Oribasius, a Greek medical author and the personal physician of the Roman emperor Julian (mid fourth-century AD). Thus, it was described in literary accounts six centuries before the next major outbreak, the Plague of Justinian.
Another excellent book, entitled "Justinian's Flea," describes that period, which was probably the first major outbreak of this devastating disease in world history, which occurred from 541-549 AD, although periodic outbreaks continued until 750, when, as in the fourteenth century, the pathogen seemed to again go dormant. This first plague pandemic also spread from China to the Mediterranean. Accounts of it are likewise preserved by Chinese physicians who described the telltale constellation of symptoms, including "malignant buboes," in about 600 AD.
Although Y. pestis was long suspected in the Plague of Justinian, researchers positively identified it at long last as the actual culprit through DNA analysis of plague victims in 2013. Some controversy remains as to whether these historic strains and variants still exist, other than the remnants of their DNA which are found in the skeletal remains of their victims. Genome testing has determined fairly conclusively that the Y. pestis strain responsible for the Black Death is the ancestor of later pandemics - as well as the descendant of the strain responsible for the Plague of Justinian. Curiously, however, a recent study of DNA recovered from plague victims in fourteenth-century London determined that a strain which caused an outbreak in Madagascar in 2013 was nearly identical to the Black Death strain.
To complicate matters: it appears from the sources, both medieval and modern, that there were at least two and probably three distinct forms of the same bacterial infection. The first, described in detail in many of the sources included in this volume by various authors, was the traditional "bubonic" form, which resulted in a high fever, up to 106 degrees, nausea, vomiting, headache, severe pain and the telltale buboes, or swollen, infected lymph nodes, which often broke open and extruded a putrid, pus-like material. This form typically resulted in death in about three days. Mortality rate for the bubonic form ranged from about 60-80% when left untreated.
The second was the so-called pneumonic form, where the primary seat of the infection was the victim's lungs, which resulted from inhaling a concentration of plague bacillus typically spread by the coughing of another victim. This airborne infection was highly contagious, and resulted in a near-100% mortality rate, often within 24 hours.
A third form, called "septicemic," did have essentially a 100% mortality rate, as the only way to determine that this strain was the cause of death was unexplained, sudden death, often without the onset of any traditional symptoms at all, with the possible exception of malaise and perhaps the rapid onset of a high fever. It was caused by a massive influx of the bacteria which overwhelmed the body's immune system, causing sudden organ failure and rapid death, within a matter of hours after infection. It is this form which is suspected in descriptions by medieval authors of victims who enjoyed a hearty lunch, only to be dead by dinner. Although these descriptions almost certainly entail some artistic license, they are only slightly exaggerated, according to modern accounts which do attest that the septicemic form can kill almost without warning in a matter of hours.
The immediate origins of the fourteenth-century outbreak remain obscure, with most evidence pointing at least toward Central Asia, perhaps in the region around the Black Sea. Its entry port to Europe reportedly came during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in the Crimea, by the Golden Horde army in 1347. Infected fleas living on black rats then traveled on Genoese ships throughout the Mediterranean, going ashore in North Africa, Western Asia, and, eventually Constantinople and the Italian Peninsula. The entry point of Europe was Sicily, when twelve Genoese galleys arrived in October, 1347. Ships from Kaffa also reached Genoa in northern Italy in January, 1348. One of the galleys expelled from Genoa then sailed to Marseilles, France, and introduced the infection there. By June, 1348, the disease had ravaged France, Spain, Portugal and England, before it turned north and spread through Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia, from 1348 to 1350. It finally reached Russia in 1351.
The plague didn't just spread west, however. It also struck various areas of the Middle East, North Africa and China, spreading over the entire Eurasian continent and India by the early 1350s. It arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, fairly early, in 1347, transmitted via Constantinople on a single merchant ship. It then traveled to Cairo, and south, throughout Lebanon, Syria, and the Levant. Sources from India and China are more scant, but it is clear that the disease did make significant inroads there, spreading possibly all the way to the Pacific ocean.
Formulating reliable statistics on the number of deaths has remained elusive. The general consensus is that 40-50% of the population of Europe, at least, died, constituting perhaps 30-50 million people. Many surviving literary sources are adamant that about a third to one-half of the population perished. Mortality in cities was typically far worse than in rural areas, often resulting in the demise of 70% of the population. Half of the population of Paris reportedly died. An estimated 60% of the populations of Hamburg and Bremen did likewise, which was probably the case in London as well. The gorgeous medieval city of Florence may have been hit hardest: tax records show that 80% of the city's population died within four months in 1348.
The countryside certainly didn't escape unscathed, however. Prior to 1350, there were approximately 170,000 settlements in the area which comprises modern-day Germany; that number was reduced by some 40,000 by 1450. Those not carried off by the plague itself often died of hunger, as crops were left to rot in the fields with no workers left to reap or sow, or violence and persecution, if they were a minority or marginalized population. Throughout Europe, the remnants of villages and settlements completely depopulated by the plague still litter the countryside - wells, walls and stone foundations are sometimes the only traces of once-thriving villages. Some cities, most notably Florence, did not attain their pre-plague populations until the nineteenth century.
I won't go into all the economic, political, social and religious consequences of such a dramatic population decline in such a short period, other than to state that the Black Death shaped the modern world to a much greater degree than most realize. Environmentally, the massive depopulation allowed deforested regions to regenerate, which may have even ushered a period of cooling, which contributed to the so-called "Little Ice Age." There was a radical shift in the power structure, which many argue led to major restructuring of the political landscape in Europe.
Perhaps most significantly: the loss of confidence in the church would result in some of the most radical changes, as a more secular world view predominated in the fourteenth century, which many theorize led to an increasingly secular world view, resulting in the Renaissance. This was likely because survivors had witnessed the widespread death of clergy as well as the lay person - indeed, mortality among monks and nuns was among the highest, as they were the first responders of their day, who were called upon to nurse and minister to the sick and dying, with the result that they perished in large numbers as well.
This is a timely book which reveals that, indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Based on our recent experiences with a global pandemic, albeit one far less devastating than the Black Death, we can see from a new perspective the world of the past, and the events which gave rise to the world we live in today.
As the editor notes, many of the sources included address the Black Death in England, and most were written by clergy, the most literate class, so they tend to skew toward one particular perspective. The volume is well organized, which makes it easy to locate the desired sources. It's divided into three primary topics: 1) Narrative Accounts, 2) Explanations and Responses, and 3) Consequences. The first part is divided into narratives from continental Europe and the British Isles; the second part into sections concerning religious explanations, "scientific" explanations, and "human agency" (i.e., specifically claims of well-poisoning, by Jews but also other marginalized and impoverished groups); and the third section into the impact of the plague and consequences.
Most of the selections are short, but informative. Their sources are also included, as a brief discussion on the texts, as there are some substantial translation and textual issues, which the author likewise addresses. I read quite a lot on this topic, but haven't encountered this particular source book previously. Overall, it was a good selection of both well-known and more obscure authors, and it offers a fairly balanced presentation of viewpoints and schools of thought regarding this far-reaching historical event, which, considering what has been occurring in our own world over the past several years, we have now only recently begun to personally appreciate.
I will include some additional information from previous reviews of books concerning this timely topic.
The Black Death is something of a misnomer - and the origins of the term are still somewhat disputed - though it may have originated with Belgian astronomer Simon de Couvin in a poem which attributed the plague to a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. In this context, it generally refers to one of several bubonic plague pandemics which have broken out on the Eurasian continent over at least the last two thousand years, but this one had the distinction of being one of the most lethal epidemics in human history. The true scale of the devastation will never be known, but modern estimates suggest that as many as fifty million people - anywhere from 40-50% of the total population of Europe, perished in a period of just about five years.
What we now know is that the disease was caused by a bacterium - not a virus - now termed Yersinia pestis, named after the Swiss-French bacteriologist from the Pasteur Institute who discovered it, Alexandre Yersin, first identifying it in 1894 during yet another plague epidemic in Hong Kong. It is a member of the genus known as Pasteurella pestis, a family of gram-negative, non-motile coccobacillus (short rod) bacteria.
The origin of the disease is disputed, but its far-reaching consequences are not. In short, this disease is a genius: it's far smarter than we are. Its uncanny ability to adapt to new surroundings and to mutate to escape the body's natural defenses render it a severe threat, even in the modern world, as antibiotic-resistant strains have been identified. It's also self-destructive, akin to a suicide bomber - that it, it spreads through populations so rapidly and kills so many so quickly that it burns itself out in due course, only to lie dormant again in populations, intermittently to rear its ugly head in periodic subsequent outbreaks.
This terrible disease appears to have evolved specifically to kill: that is its specific biological function. It appears to serve as something of a rapid-response check on exploding rodent populations among which it remains endemic, which may be triggered especially in response to changing environmental conditions. It periodically sweeps through and wipes out vast numbers when the population passes a tipping point, throwing nature out of balance, thus leaving only a few immune survivors to repopulate. New mutated strains eventually arise in place of the old one, however, to infect new, genetically-immune generations, with the intent of preventing future overpopulation.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Black Death plague wasn't carried by rats, but by their fleas: the bacterium incubates in the guts of infected Oriental rat fleas, the primary vectors, until it blocks their digestive tracts, prohibiting them from feeding. As a result, the fleas regurgitate the bacterium out of their digestive tracts to clear the blockage, often directly into the wounds of the mammals they bite. The bacterium then incubates in the new host, traveling throughout the body via the lymph system, concentrating in lymph notes, resulting in the characteristic swollen lymph nodes, most notably in the groin and under the arms and jaw. Thus, the bacteria did not evolve to directly infect humans; they essentially became collateral damage once the rodent populations the fleas fed on died, forcing them to turn to new and unfamiliar hosts... with devastating consequences.
Modern genetic analysis traces Y. pestis to the Tian Shan mountains, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. The bacterium has been dated to about 2,600 years ago. It remains endemic in the marmot population of the great steppes of central Asia, but also in North India, and now even the western United States, although in the latter case, the disease was artificially introduced. Some research suggests that the bubonic plague first infected human populations in the early Bronze Age. It is even attested in an ancient Swedish tomb dating to about 3000 BC. The symptoms of the disease were first described in a fragment of Rufus of Ephesus, preserved in the later works of Oribasius, a Greek medical author and the personal physician of the Roman emperor Julian (mid fourth-century AD). Thus, it was described in literary accounts six centuries before the next major outbreak, the Plague of Justinian.
Another excellent book, entitled "Justinian's Flea," describes that period, which was probably the first major outbreak of this devastating disease in world history, which occurred from 541-549 AD, although periodic outbreaks continued until 750, when, as in the fourteenth century, the pathogen seemed to again go dormant. This first plague pandemic also spread from China to the Mediterranean. Accounts of it are likewise preserved by Chinese physicians who described the telltale constellation of symptoms, including "malignant buboes," in about 600 AD.
Although Y. pestis was long suspected in the Plague of Justinian, researchers positively identified it at long last as the actual culprit through DNA analysis of plague victims in 2013. Some controversy remains as to whether these historic strains and variants still exist, other than the remnants of their DNA which are found in the skeletal remains of their victims. Genome testing has determined fairly conclusively that the Y. pestis strain responsible for the Black Death is the ancestor of later pandemics - as well as the descendant of the strain responsible for the Plague of Justinian. Curiously, however, a recent study of DNA recovered from plague victims in fourteenth-century London determined that a strain which caused an outbreak in Madagascar in 2013 was nearly identical to the Black Death strain.
To complicate matters: it appears from the sources, both medieval and modern, that there were at least two and probably three distinct forms of the same bacterial infection. The first, described in detail in many of the sources included in this volume by various authors, was the traditional "bubonic" form, which resulted in a high fever, up to 106 degrees, nausea, vomiting, headache, severe pain and the telltale buboes, or swollen, infected lymph nodes, which often broke open and extruded a putrid, pus-like material. This form typically resulted in death in about three days. Mortality rate for the bubonic form ranged from about 60-80% when left untreated.
The second was the so-called pneumonic form, where the primary seat of the infection was the victim's lungs, which resulted from inhaling a concentration of plague bacillus typically spread by the coughing of another victim. This airborne infection was highly contagious, and resulted in a near-100% mortality rate, often within 24 hours.
A third form, called "septicemic," did have essentially a 100% mortality rate, as the only way to determine that this strain was the cause of death was unexplained, sudden death, often without the onset of any traditional symptoms at all, with the possible exception of malaise and perhaps the rapid onset of a high fever. It was caused by a massive influx of the bacteria which overwhelmed the body's immune system, causing sudden organ failure and rapid death, within a matter of hours after infection. It is this form which is suspected in descriptions by medieval authors of victims who enjoyed a hearty lunch, only to be dead by dinner. Although these descriptions almost certainly entail some artistic license, they are only slightly exaggerated, according to modern accounts which do attest that the septicemic form can kill almost without warning in a matter of hours.
The immediate origins of the fourteenth-century outbreak remain obscure, with most evidence pointing at least toward Central Asia, perhaps in the region around the Black Sea. Its entry port to Europe reportedly came during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in the Crimea, by the Golden Horde army in 1347. Infected fleas living on black rats then traveled on Genoese ships throughout the Mediterranean, going ashore in North Africa, Western Asia, and, eventually Constantinople and the Italian Peninsula. The entry point of Europe was Sicily, when twelve Genoese galleys arrived in October, 1347. Ships from Kaffa also reached Genoa in northern Italy in January, 1348. One of the galleys expelled from Genoa then sailed to Marseilles, France, and introduced the infection there. By June, 1348, the disease had ravaged France, Spain, Portugal and England, before it turned north and spread through Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia, from 1348 to 1350. It finally reached Russia in 1351.
The plague didn't just spread west, however. It also struck various areas of the Middle East, North Africa and China, spreading over the entire Eurasian continent and India by the early 1350s. It arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, fairly early, in 1347, transmitted via Constantinople on a single merchant ship. It then traveled to Cairo, and south, throughout Lebanon, Syria, and the Levant. Sources from India and China are more scant, but it is clear that the disease did make significant inroads there, spreading possibly all the way to the Pacific ocean.
Formulating reliable statistics on the number of deaths has remained elusive. The general consensus is that 40-50% of the population of Europe, at least, died, constituting perhaps 30-50 million people. Many surviving literary sources are adamant that about a third to one-half of the population perished. Mortality in cities was typically far worse than in rural areas, often resulting in the demise of 70% of the population. Half of the population of Paris reportedly died. An estimated 60% of the populations of Hamburg and Bremen did likewise, which was probably the case in London as well. The gorgeous medieval city of Florence may have been hit hardest: tax records show that 80% of the city's population died within four months in 1348.
The countryside certainly didn't escape unscathed, however. Prior to 1350, there were approximately 170,000 settlements in the area which comprises modern-day Germany; that number was reduced by some 40,000 by 1450. Those not carried off by the plague itself often died of hunger, as crops were left to rot in the fields with no workers left to reap or sow, or violence and persecution, if they were a minority or marginalized population. Throughout Europe, the remnants of villages and settlements completely depopulated by the plague still litter the countryside - wells, walls and stone foundations are sometimes the only traces of once-thriving villages. Some cities, most notably Florence, did not attain their pre-plague populations until the nineteenth century.
I won't go into all the economic, political, social and religious consequences of such a dramatic population decline in such a short period, other than to state that the Black Death shaped the modern world to a much greater degree than most realize. Environmentally, the massive depopulation allowed deforested regions to regenerate, which may have even ushered a period of cooling, which contributed to the so-called "Little Ice Age." There was a radical shift in the power structure, which many argue led to major restructuring of the political landscape in Europe.
Perhaps most significantly: the loss of confidence in the church would result in some of the most radical changes, as a more secular world view predominated in the fourteenth century, which many theorize led to an increasingly secular world view, resulting in the Renaissance. This was likely because survivors had witnessed the widespread death of clergy as well as the lay person - indeed, mortality among monks and nuns was among the highest, as they were the first responders of their day, who were called upon to nurse and minister to the sick and dying, with the result that they perished in large numbers as well.
This is a timely book which reveals that, indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Based on our recent experiences with a global pandemic, albeit one far less devastating than the Black Death, we can see from a new perspective the world of the past, and the events which gave rise to the world we live in today.
February 16, 2017
An excellent collection of primary source documents pertaining to the monstrous bubonic plague epidemic of 1347-1349 A.D., which eradicated somewhere between 30%-50% of the population of the known world. The book does well to establish the sense of horror and confusion of those who died and those who survived, as well as documenting the social and cultural changes which were initiated by "The Black Death".
September 24, 2020
Great compendium of primary sources. Many were repetitive, especially at the end in the "Consequences of the Plague" section, where extracts from courts and damages to tenement holdings would be printed ad nauseum.
April 6, 2021
This was a very good book. It was really interesting to see how the plague impacted people in the 13th century. The only problem with the book is that it can be very repetitive when it comes to the different sections, it is just different people saying the same thing over again at some points.
February 20, 2020
Great resource!
March 20, 2020
Excellent edited volume of primary and near-contemporary sources covering most aspects of the Black Death and its aftermath in England and beyond.
Read
April 20, 2024christ
Read
July 29, 20241346 to 1353
November 17, 2025
relevant and interesting. Everything you want a book to be
May 21, 2024
“The Black Death” by Rosemary Horrox provides a comprehensive and detailed account of one of history's most devastating pandemics, blending primary sources with insightful analysis. While Horrox's meticulous research and extensive use of contemporary documents offer a vivid and informative portrayal of the plague's impact on 14th-century Europe, the dense academic style may be challenging for general readers. The book excels in its thoroughness and historical accuracy, but the narrative can feel dry and overwhelming at times, lacking the engaging storytelling that might appeal to a broader audience. Overall, it is a valuable resource for those deeply interested in medieval history, though its scholarly approach may not suit everyone.
June 5, 2007
This book is a wonderful introduction to the sweep of the plague through Europe. It consists of a few chapters of well-chosen primary sources from the time--this in itself is unremarkable. However, there are the most useful and insightful introductions to each section of primary accounts. So, ah, you should read it if you find the plague interesting.
April 25, 2007
Rosemary Horrox's collection of documents relating to the Black Death is thorough, well organized, and includes many previously unpublished sources. While the focus is mainly on England, she also includes documents from Italy, France and Germany.
September 11, 2013
It was like reading a lot of documents. Some were very interesting. Some were very boring. All in all it was not a waste of time for the view of the time. When I read anything else about the time period I'll have that in the background for context.
Read
August 28, 2014An invaluable desktop reference book.
:D
If you're writing a novel about the Black Death, that is. This is an excellent compendium of primary sources from the Black Death in Europe. Clearly organised and with useful introductions to each of the three sections.
:D
If you're writing a novel about the Black Death, that is. This is an excellent compendium of primary sources from the Black Death in Europe. Clearly organised and with useful introductions to each of the three sections.
July 29, 2008
A great collection of primary sources.
May 1, 2012
this sourcebook is wonderful if you are interested in the Black Death or just that time period in the late middle ages. A must have!
February 8, 2013
Great sources.
September 12, 2016
For my Medieval European History class. Sad.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews