What do you think?
Rate this book
From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages by John Aberth (9-Nov-2009) Paperback
The later Middle Ages was a period of unparalleled chaos and misery -in the form of war, famine, plague, and death. At times it must have seemed like the end of the world was truly at hand. And yet, as John Aberth reveals in this lively work, late medieval Europeans' cultural assumptions uniquely equipped them to face up postively to the huge problems that they faced.
Relying on rich literary, historical and material sources, the book brings this period and its beliefs and attitudes vividly to life. Taking his themes from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, John Aberth describes how the lives of ordinary people were transformed by a series of crises, including the Great Famine, the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Yet he also shows how prayers, chronicles, poetry, and especially commemorative art reveal an optimistic people, whose belief in the apocalypse somehow gave them the ability to transcend the woes they faced on this earth.
Relying on rich literary, historical and material sources, the book brings this period and its beliefs and attitudes vividly to life. Taking his themes from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, John Aberth describes how the lives of ordinary people were transformed by a series of crises, including the Great Famine, the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Yet he also shows how prayers, chronicles, poetry, and especially commemorative art reveal an optimistic people, whose belief in the apocalypse somehow gave them the ability to transcend the woes they faced on this earth.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
7 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
John Aberth
24 books12 followersJohn Aberth serves as associate academic dean at Castleton State College, where he teaches history.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Read
August 21, 2021I started reading this in first year but stopped when I got to the 'plague' chapter, and picked it up again last week for obvious reasons
Things I didn't know but do now:
-thanks to our modern understanding of weather and climate, we now know that famines of the early 14th century were caused by the 'little ice age'. This undermines the more traditional view that the famines were a necessary malthusian catastrophe brought about by sudden population growth
-these famines laid the groundwork for the plague, since prolonged hunger led to lasting health defects that made people more susceptible to illness. We know this because the telltale marks of starvation are overrepresented in the skeletons found in old plague pits
-there was some argument for a while about whether the black death was actually caused by bubonic plague, with some people suggesting anthrax or even hiv (turns out it was definitely plague)
-it's common knowledge that plague doctors were quacks, but I had assumed that every now and then one of them would've stumbled across some genuine remedies. author of this book argues that plague doctors by and large contributed to the mortality of 'the great pestilence' with treatments that actively endangered their patients. There's a story about how they would often lance the bubos of an infected person and then prophylactically do bloodletting on other members of their family, using the same instruments. this not only infected them but usually resulted in them developing the septicaemic variety of plague which kills you even quicker. The only thing that worked to prevent plague was quarantine and isolation (!)
-the hysteria about jews poisoning wells was very real and widespread, and probably led to the most significant mass killings of jews until the holocaust. controversially the author argues that while antisemitism certainly explains why jews were targeted, we have to understand that for the average person living through the plague – whose cause was completely unknown – any explanation was highly attractive, particularly one that offered a solution (eliminate the people doing the poisonings).
It's also interesting that perversely this conspiracy was the closest medieval people got to a vaguely realistic understanding of the mechanism of plague, since to understand it as a poison at least implies acknowledging that it was caused by a material substance rather than some supernatural force enacting divine judgment
-the combined agents of war, famine and plague during the late middle ages transformed cultures of death and mortality. The figure of Death appears more in art from this period, specifically as a personified character who dialogues with the living.
-The author argues that it's difficult to put oneself into the mind of a medieval European, for whom belief in resurrection and the afterlife was taken for granted. This explains how it was possible for life to go on through all these crises, plague in particular – people took solace in the thought that the apocalypse might be near (which it really seemed like it might be, given that the four horsemen were a constant presence for about a century) since it meant they would be resurrected and reunited with their bodies (specifically as they were at age 30). For the author this suggests that the macabre culture of the time – which included the 'Dance of Death', construction of tombs featuring sculptures of the deceased person as a decomposed cadaver, and poems and fables about death as the great leveller –was not so icky and macabre to people back then, and these things probably served more as uplifting reminders that dying was just a necessary transitional stage in the path to the great beyond where everything would be better
Things I didn't know but do now:
-thanks to our modern understanding of weather and climate, we now know that famines of the early 14th century were caused by the 'little ice age'. This undermines the more traditional view that the famines were a necessary malthusian catastrophe brought about by sudden population growth
-these famines laid the groundwork for the plague, since prolonged hunger led to lasting health defects that made people more susceptible to illness. We know this because the telltale marks of starvation are overrepresented in the skeletons found in old plague pits
-there was some argument for a while about whether the black death was actually caused by bubonic plague, with some people suggesting anthrax or even hiv (turns out it was definitely plague)
-it's common knowledge that plague doctors were quacks, but I had assumed that every now and then one of them would've stumbled across some genuine remedies. author of this book argues that plague doctors by and large contributed to the mortality of 'the great pestilence' with treatments that actively endangered their patients. There's a story about how they would often lance the bubos of an infected person and then prophylactically do bloodletting on other members of their family, using the same instruments. this not only infected them but usually resulted in them developing the septicaemic variety of plague which kills you even quicker. The only thing that worked to prevent plague was quarantine and isolation (!)
-the hysteria about jews poisoning wells was very real and widespread, and probably led to the most significant mass killings of jews until the holocaust. controversially the author argues that while antisemitism certainly explains why jews were targeted, we have to understand that for the average person living through the plague – whose cause was completely unknown – any explanation was highly attractive, particularly one that offered a solution (eliminate the people doing the poisonings).
It's also interesting that perversely this conspiracy was the closest medieval people got to a vaguely realistic understanding of the mechanism of plague, since to understand it as a poison at least implies acknowledging that it was caused by a material substance rather than some supernatural force enacting divine judgment
-the combined agents of war, famine and plague during the late middle ages transformed cultures of death and mortality. The figure of Death appears more in art from this period, specifically as a personified character who dialogues with the living.
-The author argues that it's difficult to put oneself into the mind of a medieval European, for whom belief in resurrection and the afterlife was taken for granted. This explains how it was possible for life to go on through all these crises, plague in particular – people took solace in the thought that the apocalypse might be near (which it really seemed like it might be, given that the four horsemen were a constant presence for about a century) since it meant they would be resurrected and reunited with their bodies (specifically as they were at age 30). For the author this suggests that the macabre culture of the time – which included the 'Dance of Death', construction of tombs featuring sculptures of the deceased person as a decomposed cadaver, and poems and fables about death as the great leveller –was not so icky and macabre to people back then, and these things probably served more as uplifting reminders that dying was just a necessary transitional stage in the path to the great beyond where everything would be better
April 30, 2009
I love the Black Death, I really do. I find it so fascinating how our ancestors lived: precarious and full of fear of sickness all the time. We have no idea. This is a very interesting analysis of a dark time in humanity and why it was so awful. Average lifespan of 25? 10-30 percent of the population wiped out as disease swept through the continent? Horrific and fascinating.
February 16, 2013
John Aberth’s From the Brink of the Apocalypse is a broad scope presentation of the interrelated elements of famine, war and plague and their effect upon the social and cultural landscape of fourteenth century Europe. Organized around the “Four Horseman” trope, Aberth attempts to illustrate that the Black Death was only one of the catastrophic influences upon the population. This edition is updated to include new scholarship and a re-written “Epitaph” chapter that addresses his underlying, though often lost, thesis that the apocalyptic tenor of the era, rather than shocking the population into stasis, created opportunities for the lower echelon, opportunities that paved the way to the Renaissance. Aberth focuses primarily on the secular experience, and while the Church permeates every aspect of medieval life, the chaos that the institution itself is embroiled in, such as the Great Schism and the Babylonian Captivity, that colored the Black Death as God’s vengeance is, curiously, relegated to background noise rather than being factored into the psychological impact resultant in the apocalyptic thematic that he is tracing.
Aberth’s book is ideally suited for undergraduate level inquiry. It provides a broad base introduction to the fourteenth century that, at times, skirts the edge of in depth analysis. The first Chapter, Famine, is a fairly tight analysis of the impact the Great Famine of 1314-17 had on the population early in the century. More importantly, it highlights the relationship between famine and malnutrition that results in a “’synergistic package’ between famines and chronic infections” that are not generally considered when calculating the impact of famine upon population numbers (41). Although Aberth does not make any attempt to quantify the impact of this connection, by broadening the scope, he is able to set up the dovetailing pattern between famine, war and plague that provide the scaffolding for his book.
The second chapter, War, is a meandering exploration of the effect of the Hundred Years War, primarily upon noncombatants. His examination of propaganda is quite interesting, utilizing both the literary record and the record of state encouraged sermon, as well as highlighting the pulpit as a disseminator of war updates to keep the population in favor of continued taxation in support of a war against a Christian nation that was lining the pockets of the treasury and the elite. His analysis of the economic impact of the Hundred Years War is a bit light. Aberth sprinkles this chapter, which is highly focused on England, with the occasional foray into the actions of the French and the Aragonese when their war activities coincide with outbreaks of Typhus and “French Pox” in an effort to continue linking the four horsemen motif. These moments feel disconnected from the rest of the chapter.
The third chapter, Plague, is, perhaps, the most problematic. The chapter feels hobbled together, and in spite of the prologue’s promise that this updated version would include new scholarship, adheres to the standard tripartite rat, flea, and plague convention, although he does put his personal stamp on the death rate through the use of bishops’ registers, to 40-60 percent. His archival research on medical practices in this section, however, makes repeated derisive comments on the use of astrology in medicine, without pausing to acknowledge that the two, from the time of Galen, were used in conjunction and would explain why timing was considered vital to treatment; it did not simply provide an “out” for doctors whose patients died. Given his use of the fourteenth century literary corpus, which would, of course, include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales whose physician is lauded for his prowess in astrology, and Aberth’s use of medical texts from throughout the Christian and Arab world, the disdainful tone and repeated jabs at this type of medical practice belies a modern bias that undermines his analysis.
The last chapter, Death, uses cultural artifacts, such as Transi Tombs, church frescoes and literature that were part of the cult of remembrance and indicative of the changing views of death in the wake of the Black Death. This is Aberth’s most successful chapter. He traces the origins of the depiction of death as a skeleton, a break in artistic convention, and traces its dissemination from France into England. His analysis of the changes in art and literature and their resonance with the relationship between body and soul is insightful.
The Epitaph section is a personal, first person narrative that reiterates his belief in the transcendence of the medieval into modernity as reaction to the apocalyptic crises of the fourteenth century. Without the belief in the reunion of body and soul post-apocalypse, the caesura created by these crises, the courage to find new ways to deal with upheaval on the material plain would have been impossible. Finally, we have a definitive thesis, one which had been inconstant and oft abandoned in the earlier chapters.
Overall, Aberth has produced a tome which, at times, feels cobbled together, suffers from breadth of scope that robs from his ability to produce deep analysis. Aberth is a great story teller, but colorful anecdotes are not history, and given a taste of his ability to produce cogent analysis for the Death chapter, one walks away feeling less than satisfied.
Aberth’s book is ideally suited for undergraduate level inquiry. It provides a broad base introduction to the fourteenth century that, at times, skirts the edge of in depth analysis. The first Chapter, Famine, is a fairly tight analysis of the impact the Great Famine of 1314-17 had on the population early in the century. More importantly, it highlights the relationship between famine and malnutrition that results in a “’synergistic package’ between famines and chronic infections” that are not generally considered when calculating the impact of famine upon population numbers (41). Although Aberth does not make any attempt to quantify the impact of this connection, by broadening the scope, he is able to set up the dovetailing pattern between famine, war and plague that provide the scaffolding for his book.
The second chapter, War, is a meandering exploration of the effect of the Hundred Years War, primarily upon noncombatants. His examination of propaganda is quite interesting, utilizing both the literary record and the record of state encouraged sermon, as well as highlighting the pulpit as a disseminator of war updates to keep the population in favor of continued taxation in support of a war against a Christian nation that was lining the pockets of the treasury and the elite. His analysis of the economic impact of the Hundred Years War is a bit light. Aberth sprinkles this chapter, which is highly focused on England, with the occasional foray into the actions of the French and the Aragonese when their war activities coincide with outbreaks of Typhus and “French Pox” in an effort to continue linking the four horsemen motif. These moments feel disconnected from the rest of the chapter.
The third chapter, Plague, is, perhaps, the most problematic. The chapter feels hobbled together, and in spite of the prologue’s promise that this updated version would include new scholarship, adheres to the standard tripartite rat, flea, and plague convention, although he does put his personal stamp on the death rate through the use of bishops’ registers, to 40-60 percent. His archival research on medical practices in this section, however, makes repeated derisive comments on the use of astrology in medicine, without pausing to acknowledge that the two, from the time of Galen, were used in conjunction and would explain why timing was considered vital to treatment; it did not simply provide an “out” for doctors whose patients died. Given his use of the fourteenth century literary corpus, which would, of course, include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales whose physician is lauded for his prowess in astrology, and Aberth’s use of medical texts from throughout the Christian and Arab world, the disdainful tone and repeated jabs at this type of medical practice belies a modern bias that undermines his analysis.
The last chapter, Death, uses cultural artifacts, such as Transi Tombs, church frescoes and literature that were part of the cult of remembrance and indicative of the changing views of death in the wake of the Black Death. This is Aberth’s most successful chapter. He traces the origins of the depiction of death as a skeleton, a break in artistic convention, and traces its dissemination from France into England. His analysis of the changes in art and literature and their resonance with the relationship between body and soul is insightful.
The Epitaph section is a personal, first person narrative that reiterates his belief in the transcendence of the medieval into modernity as reaction to the apocalyptic crises of the fourteenth century. Without the belief in the reunion of body and soul post-apocalypse, the caesura created by these crises, the courage to find new ways to deal with upheaval on the material plain would have been impossible. Finally, we have a definitive thesis, one which had been inconstant and oft abandoned in the earlier chapters.
Overall, Aberth has produced a tome which, at times, feels cobbled together, suffers from breadth of scope that robs from his ability to produce deep analysis. Aberth is a great story teller, but colorful anecdotes are not history, and given a taste of his ability to produce cogent analysis for the Death chapter, one walks away feeling less than satisfied.
September 12, 2017
Living in the 21st century it's hard to fathom a 13th century and what that must have been like. The hardships people suffered. Nothing but constant war, and disease. This book carefully records war, famine and plagues of medieval times. Even a mini ice age of between the 14th and 15th century. This followed the "warm" medieval years. One thing I found interesting was the severe climate changes during the middles ages. These changes are what resulted in famines and thus the Black Death plague. So apparently these severe changes in climate were nothing new. In between these terrible times was the 100 years war.
Truly fascinating look at the Kingdoms of England, the intersection of religion, the many wars. Highly recommend if you'd like a look into these decades of turbulence.
Truly fascinating look at the Kingdoms of England, the intersection of religion, the many wars. Highly recommend if you'd like a look into these decades of turbulence.
March 19, 2024
This book was one that I read for an assignment a couple of weeks ago and never got around to reviewing. I found the information about the Black Death to be particularly useful. The author was very knowledgeable about the plague and the time period in general.
Read
April 29, 2023Read for history seminar
June 11, 2010
Aberth's revised edition of this book is quite fascinating in its essential argument that the late middle ages did not represent a period of decline, as J. Huizinga argues in The Waning of the Middle Ages, but rather one of, to use Aberth's term, "transcendence." He puts forth a strong thesis that many of the morbid elements of late medieval art and culture do not represent a society overwhelmed by a period described by popular historian Barbara Tuchman as "calamitous," but rather a sign that medieval people were confronting the difficult times in which they lived directly and creating and understanding and coping mechanism that was, essentially, positive. He breaks down this response using the artifice of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, explaining the impact and response of famine, war, pestilence, and death respectively.
This revision includes the most up-to-date scholarship on these subjects and incorporates data from Ole Benedictow's masterful The Black Death 1346-1353: A Complete History as well as a tremendous variety of other sources. Unfortunately, Professor Aberth, rather than providing footnotes and bibliography, simply provides an albeit exhaustive list of sources grouped by topic at the end of the book. There is also a curious shift in the voice of this book from a more formal historiographical treatment in the first three sections to an increasingly personal and less formal voice in the final chapter and epitaph. This doesn't detract from the success of the book as a piece of scholarship, but it is rather poor editing. Also, one would think that, considering this is a revision of an earlier book, that the captions for the illustrations on p. 232 would have been correct, but instead they are two different captions for the same image appended to two different pictures.
This revision includes the most up-to-date scholarship on these subjects and incorporates data from Ole Benedictow's masterful The Black Death 1346-1353: A Complete History as well as a tremendous variety of other sources. Unfortunately, Professor Aberth, rather than providing footnotes and bibliography, simply provides an albeit exhaustive list of sources grouped by topic at the end of the book. There is also a curious shift in the voice of this book from a more formal historiographical treatment in the first three sections to an increasingly personal and less formal voice in the final chapter and epitaph. This doesn't detract from the success of the book as a piece of scholarship, but it is rather poor editing. Also, one would think that, considering this is a revision of an earlier book, that the captions for the illustrations on p. 232 would have been correct, but instead they are two different captions for the same image appended to two different pictures.
June 1, 2013
Good in some parts, but also tries too hard to make the apocalyptic thesis fit. Special mention though for Aberth – bizarrely - claiming that the persecution of the Jews occurred outside of longstanding resentment of Jews and didn’t mark a change in Jewish-Christian relations because it was “a quite rational attempt to avert or end the plague.” He doesn't say the action was "rational" or defend the pogroms, but he does play down anti-Semitism as the cause of pogroms (though he then seems to contradict himself 20 pages later by talking about how the pogroms created a culture that would exist until the Holocaust).
Also just dismisses out of hand revisionist and Marxist interpretations of plague without seriously examining their arguments. In the book he devotes about a paragraph to them and even then never directly quotes them. Furthermore Marxist authors are completely missing from the bibliography. Say what you will about these schools of thought on the plague, when their interpretation is diametrically opposed to your own it's probably important to give some refutation.
Also just dismisses out of hand revisionist and Marxist interpretations of plague without seriously examining their arguments. In the book he devotes about a paragraph to them and even then never directly quotes them. Furthermore Marxist authors are completely missing from the bibliography. Say what you will about these schools of thought on the plague, when their interpretation is diametrically opposed to your own it's probably important to give some refutation.
May 21, 2024
“From the Brink of the Apocalypse” by John Aberth provides a detailed exploration of Europe's crises during the late Middle Ages, from the Black Death to the Hundred Years' War. While Aberth's scholarly approach offers a comprehensive look at the tumultuous period, the dense academic prose can be challenging to navigate, often making the material feel dry and less accessible to general readers. The book excels in its meticulous research and the breadth of historical context it covers, but at times it struggles to maintain an engaging narrative flow. Overall, while "From the Brink of the Apocalypse" is an informative resource for understanding medieval catastrophes, it may not captivate all readers due to its heavy academic tone.
January 26, 2008
Great book. This book was the reason I wrote my senior thesis on this time period.
January 5, 2012
Criticised by some on its release, this book has now gone into a second edition and is vital reading for anyone interested in the European (especially British) Mediaeval worldview.
January 30, 2013
If you really want to live in the Middle Ages, this book is for you! Graphic, accurate, brutal and well-written - a great history find!!
June 30, 2013
I finished this book years ago and can't recall enough details to give an informed critique.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews