The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Medicine, Medical, Medieval, Historical

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2005

About the author

John Kelly specializes in narrative history. He is the author of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death; The Most Devastating Plague of all Time; Three on the Edge; and more. Kelly lives in New York City and Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, ‘This is the end of the world.’ His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349. It was corpses packed like ‘lasagna’ in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through early-morning streets to pick up the previous day’s dead, husbands abandoning dying wives and parents abandoning dying children – for fear of contagion – and knots of people crouched over latrines and sewers inhaling the noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague. It was dusty roads packed with panicked refugees, ghost ships crewed by corpses, and a feral child running wild in a deserted mountain village. For a moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, millions of people across Eurasia began to contemplate the end of civilization, and with it perhaps the end of the human race…”
- John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

Most historians believe that the Black Death – the bubonic plague – originated somewhere in inner Asia, and then spread along trade routes to the Middle East, China, and Europe. Wherever it started, its first definitive appearance came in the Crimea in 1347, borne there by the fleas on the rats that stowed away on Genoese ships. From there, it went west, first to Mediterranean ports, then turning inland.

Perhaps the greatest natural disaster in history, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people, deaths on a scale so vast that the term “apocalyptic” is not an exaggeration. The plague decimated cities, emptied villages, shook the foundations of society, and even spread to animals. No respecter of wealth or class, the Black Death killed princes and peasants alike.

In The Great Mortality, John Kelly attempts a difficult feat, to not only tell the story of a continent-spanning pandemic on a personal level, but to tackle the many controversies and debates about the Black Death that still exist to this day. While Kelly’s region-by-region recounting can become tedious – and grim – this book still has a great deal to offer.

***

Writing about a disease is difficult. No matter how widespread, illness is an intensely personal experience, with men and women suffering and dying behind closed doors, in private rooms. Compared to viruses and bacterial infections, wars are only fractionally as lethal. Yet entire sections in bookstores are devoted to mankind’s clashes, because war lends itself to storytelling. It is far easier to comprehend a conflict – with its ebbs, flows, pivotal figures, and eventual resolution – than to shape a narrative around ordinary people getting sick and dying in different geographical locations, over the course of years.

Kelly deals with this inherent issue by giving us characters to follow. Appropriately, he starts by introducing the villain.

***

The scientific name of the plague bacillus is Yersinia pestis. Anywhere from 1,500 to 20,000 years old, Y. pestis resides at the end of a complex infection chain, its principal vector being the rodent flea. Once the flea has killed off its host – typically a rat – it jumps to humans to avoid starvation. While there are actually three types of plague, the most common form is bubonic, which causes the most striking symptom: an egg-shaped, tumorlike protuberance called a bubo.

Known as a “wandering sickness,” the plague is slow-moving when compared to influenzas. It has other limitations as well. For instance, it cannot survive for long on surfaces, and it favors a relatively narrow temperature range. In the Middle Ages, however, where rats predominated, where the population was often pre-weakened by earlier famines, and where a bath was considered an inducement from the devil, the Black Death wreaked havoc.

***

After giving us the background of the plague, Kelly moves into the tale of the Black Death itself.

As promised on the cover, the focus is on the people dealing with this unprecedented catastrophe. Utilizing extant records, Kelly will start at a location, such as Messina or Genoa, and follow an individual or two as they deal with the outbreak. Providing effective, sometimes gripping mini-arcs, Kelly’s approach does a fine job of establishing the enormity of the disaster by homing in on the specifics.

Not surprisingly, the responses to the Black Death were varied. Some cities accepted the plague as a punishment from God. Others, like Venice, formulated sophisticated – and occasionally – ruthless responses. Some people rose to meet the occasion, while others quailed. In Sicily, a brave notary stuck to his post to finish wills, while in England priests were accused of deserting their flocks for the countryside.

Kelly’s writing can be evocative. I found him at his best when he used a bit of creative license – which he acknowledges – to actually imagine the scenes that unfolded, putting you on the streets littered with the dead. Of course, one of the consequences of skillfully evoking horror is that the horror becomes a bit much. Though this is a pretty lean volume – around 300 pages of text – it begins to drag and blur as Kelly takes us from one place to the next, describing the same thing over and over, with just the names changing.

***

Thankfully, as a respite, Kelly intersperses the plague-death descriptions with some fascinating discussions about ancillary topics. One of those is filth, and I loved how Kelly showed the evolution from antiquity’s “ingenious sanitation techniques” – underground sewers, aqueducts, and public bathhouses – to Middle Age Europeans shouting “look out below” three times before emptying chamber pots onto the street. There is also a section on the Flagellants, who traveled hither and yon beating themselves in a public display that straddled hyper-religiosity and sexual kink.

Far more seriously, The Great Mortality spends a good amount of time on the rise of anti-Semitism that followed the path of the plague. Pegged as scapegoats, pogroms broke out all over Europe, leading to the expulsion or murder of countless Jews. As Kelly points out, these pogroms were unrivaled until the 1930s.

Kelly ends The Great Mortality with a final chapter dealing with the theory that the Black Death was not the plague at all, but something else entirely. Arguing about pandemics, it seems, is part of humanity’s shared heritage.

***

The ugly reality about pandemics – especially given our modern interconnectedness – is that they are eventualities, not potentialities. Despite being published in 2005, The Great Mortality feels entirely relevant because of this fact. Kelly did not know about the infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus when he wrote these words, yet there are parallels between the Black Death of the 1300s and the maladies that followed, including Covid-19.

Then, as now, social systems were overwhelmed, public order was threatened, and fingers were pointed. Then, as now, many suffered while some profited. Then, as now, the desperate or the dumb tried far-out remedies without any empirical proof of efficacy. Then, as now, the pandemic altered the rhythms of life in this world. Unfortunately, one of the things that The Great Mortality does not dwell upon is how people recovered after the plague reshaped their existence. That is a lesson we are probably going to need in the years to come.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book.

After all, it combined two of my nerdiest obsessions: Late Middle Ages history and Y. pestis, my favorite bacteria. (I'm a microbiology nerd- and besides, everyone should have a favorite bacteria.)

Sadly, John Kelly tweaked too many of my pet peeves to make me truly enjoy this book.

Allow me to list a few:

"... Petrarch dined with the aristocratic Colonna, walked the beaches of Naples with the beautiful Queen Joanna, attended audiences with Clement VI- if there had been a fourteenth century "People", the fish-eyed poet would have been on the cover under the headline, "The Fabulous Francesco!" (pg 123)

No- just- no.

Also- he implied that the Templars should have known to be careful on the day they were nearly wiped out because it was Friday the 13th. Except that Friday the 13th was not mentioned as unlucky until, at the earliest, the 19th century.

I can almost forgive the ridiculous and the unintentional anachronisms. Those can be the product of an over eager author and a limited knowledge of popular folklore. But I cannot forgive bad editing. The footnote on pg 153 states, "Life is rarely so heat". That was not my typo- it was his. Surely he meant "Life is rarely so neat", but that seems like something that should be caught during proofreading.

The most damning of both the author and the editor, however, is when he tells us that Bristol "literally exploded". No, sir, it did not. Bristol did not literally explode. It may have figuratively exploded, but I count on you, and certainly your editor, to understand the difference between something "literally" happening and something "figuratively" happening.

I realize that these may seem like small complaints, but I have high expectations for a nonfiction book. I have a hard time with it because I went to this book to learn, and I have difficulty trusting an author's research and expertise on a topic when he cannot bother to understand the meaning of the word "literally".

Over all I was pretty disappointed with this book.

[Nataliya · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death—and what medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, and medieval Muslims, the Year of Annihilation—remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.”

The story of the Black Death in the 1340s in Europe is a story of an unimaginable nightmare. The plague came in a wave of a true apocalypse the scale of which is really staggering and near impossible to comprehend.

“In the three and a half years it took Y. pestis to complete its circle of death, plague touched the life of every individual European: killing a third of them, leaving the other two-thirds grieving and weeping. Here is the story of that epic tragedy.”

The cities at the time of the Black Death were basically cesspools. Refuse, excrement, horrible hygiene, and hordes of rats. And then the Plague came, like a Biblical horror it must have seemed to people, wiping out a third to half of the population, with nothing being able to stop it, helped along by not only the utter lack of sanitation but also by overpopulation and several famines that have weakened the immune systems for years to come.

“Plague is a disease of rodents. People are simply collateral damage, wastage in a titanic global struggle between the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis and the world’s rodent population.”

John Kelly gives us a background on the plague, including the debates on whether the Black Death was the plague or something else (even speculations of it being anthrax, apparently unfounded), the plague in rodent populations (rats vs marmots) and how perfectly the rat-borne disease was suited for the filth of the medieval cities.

“The city makes men free,” medieval Germans told one another, but a combination of people, rats, flies, waste, and garbage concentrated inside a few square miles of town wall also made the medieval city a human cesspool.”
———
“In much of medieval Europe, sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout, “Look out below!” three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street.”
———
“On the meanest of medieval streets, the ambience of the barnyard gave way to the ambience of the battlefield. Often, animals were abandoned where they fell, left to boil in the summer sun, to be picked over by rats and ransacked by neighborhood children, who yanked bones from decaying oxen and cows and carved them into dice. The municipal dog catcher, who rarely picked up after a dog cull (kill), and the surgeon barber, who rarely poured his patients’ blood anywhere except on the street in front of his shop, also contributed to the squalid morning-after-battle atmosphere.
Along with the dog catcher and surgeon barber, Rattus’s other great urban ally was the medieval butcher. In Paris, London, and other large towns, animals were slaughtered outdoors on the street, and since butchers rarely picked up after themselves either, in most cities the butchers’ district was a Goya-esque horror of animal remains. Rivers of blood seeped into nearby gardens and parks, and piles of hearts, livers, and intestines accumulated under the butchers’ bloody boots, attracting swarms of rats, flies, and street urchins.
The greatest urban polluter was probably the full chamber pot. No one wanted to walk down one or two flights of stairs, especially on a cold, rainy night. So, in most cities, medieval urbanites opened the window, shouted, “Look out below!” three times, and hoped for the best. In Paris, which had 210,000 residents, the song of the chamber pot echoed through the city from morning to night, intermingling with the lewd guffaws of the prostitutes on the Ile de la Cité and the mournful bleats of the animals going to slaughter at St. Jacques-la-Boucherie on the Right Bank.”

And we see the inevitable plague progression through Europe, the unstoppable Black Death, in the 1340s. Originating far East, it spread via the Genoese ships from Caffa in the Crimea onwards, sparing nowhere. Quite a few accounts were left behind, and just like for John Kelly, for me this was heartbreaking, too: “One imagines that this was the day Agnolo added the concluding sentence to his chronicle for 1348: “And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”

“In the Black Death, mortalities of 30 and 40 percent were common, and in the urban centers of eastern England and central Italy, death rates reached an almost unimaginable 50 to 60 percent.”

The plague took an immense toll on the society. And it brought the worst out in people who were grasping at anything trying to make any sense of the senselessness. Blame had to be apportioned, and the results varied from blaming “loose” female behavior to self-flagellation to most brutal pogroms in the horrific spike of antisemitism that seems to be always haunting Europe. This was indeed the end of the world and rationality.

“After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, “This is the end of the world.” His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349. It was corpses packed like “lasagna” in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through early-morning streets to pick up the previous day’s dead, husbands abandoning dying wives and parents abandoning dying children—for fear of contagion—and knots of people crouched over latrines and sewers inhaling the noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague. It was dusty roads packed with panicked refugees, ghost ships crewed by corpses, and a feral child running wild in a deserted mountain village. For a moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, millions of people across Eurasia began to contemplate the end of civilization, and with it perhaps the end of the human race.”

It’s written to be academic, often a bit dry, quite detailed and sometimes skirting tediousness. But the material remains interesting nevertheless, and it’s hard to become used to the scale of the suffering even if it was repetitive. After all, the horror lies exactly in the inevitability of this repetitiveness no matter where it struck.

3.5 stars.
——————

Also posted on my blog.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read some books on the Black Death, and yet this one added a lot of insight into the Plague. The topic is grim but the books is fascinating.
OverDrive, thank you!

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing ‘The Great Mortality’ by John Kelly, I am not certain what is more horrific - being sick with the Bubonic Plague, or daily life in the 14th century, especially in European cities.

Please note I am a modern person of the female gender. This means I like a daily hot shower, household cleansers utilized almost every day, flushable toilets connected to piping which whisk away invisibly whatever is in the bowl, toilet paper and my vacuum (with attachments). I highly appreciate fresh smelling clothes, people and streets. Household pets get baths when they smell, as do husbands who work out, fix cars or repair broken steps on porches. Everything that is garbage is shoved into black bags, which are tied up and placed outside on the curb once a week to be picked up and taken away.

Europeans in the era of the Black Death weren’t having it, nothing doing, if it meant being clean - having to scrub anything free of dirt or filth - even if cleaning, washing, sewers, toilets, and garbage pickup had been available, which it wasn’t.

Europeans in the 14th century believed taking two baths in one year was one too many. From the descriptions in this book, based on letters, articles, books, and journals written in the time of the Black Plague, people basically wore garbage and filth, slept in garbage and filth, ate garbage and filth, and worked in garbage and filth. When the Black Death came, people thought breathing deeply of poop fumes was a cure. So, they sought out and stood in their local bathroom trenches and ditches full of poop, instead of ignoring all of the human and animal waste about them as they had previously.

Rats loved the increased availability of food near prospering European people during the 14th century. More food meant more rats. So. Fleas love rats. A lot of rats mean a lot more fleas - disease-carrying plague-infected fleas. Ships transported goods and food everywhere, so rats and their fleas got transported everywhere.

Suddenly it was 'apocalypse now'. People died in three days if the plague got in their lungs. It took little longer if it went elsewhere in the human body. The plague also killed cats, dogs, goats and sheep. Since rats and fleas are common but plague is not, scientists theorize a superbug or a sudden DNA mutation happened. They suspect the illness may have begun in Russia, or in Mongolia, based on written records and narratives. It spread out along trade routes. But these are educated guesses, likely as they may be. Could it have been an ebola-type thing? Who knows. There have been three major plague-like pandemics. Two are linked because they might have happened by the same disease we generally call the Black Plague (linked by an analysis of DNA from a corpse’s tooth). Maybe.

I just finished a book about Arabic science up to the 15 century. Most people in the Middle-East washed a lot, took baths, whenever they could. In fact, most civilizations of earlier times washed and used soap, even though soap was very expensive. Everybody bathed when they could manage it - except the Europeans. Wow.

The ancient Greeks and especially the ancient Romans had public baths, accessible to all of their citizens for a few pennies. And sewers! They had sophisticated sewers, public bathrooms and public fountains, flowing with water from mountain streams. Drinkable free water! But what were Europeans thinking, seven hundred years after the ancient but clean Romans passed? They were thinking baths are bad and Poop Cures are cool. They drank wine all day, even the children. Hmmmm.

Ok, then. Not that living in poop had anything to do with the main subject of this book. It is simply mentioned in passing the fact that Europeans, especially urban Europeans, lived their lives wearing crusted bits of poop 💩 about their bodies and clothes, with piles of poop surrounding their homes for centuries in the Middle Ages, whether they lived in palaces or hovels. This 'natural-fiber' accidental fashion accessory which also served as a domestic health cure for fad-following hypochondriacs in the Middle Ages fascinates me, even more than watching binge drunks trying to function at ordinary tasks.

‘The Great Mortality’ actually is a very well-researched and detailed academic book about how the Black Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, a close friend of fleas, impacted the daily life of many 14th-century European countries. The author follows the path of the disease in detail across Europe, country by country, month by month. He shows the probable path of the disease across Asia, which appeared to follow trade and troops routes. He describes the general lifestyle of people from Italy to France to England to Germany to Scandinavia, the technology they had, the current politics of the time and the various wars which had been begun shortly before the plague came, the health conditions and what commerce in the cities had been ongoing before and after the Black Plague began to kill.

It is estimated the Black Plague killed from a third to half of the population of Europe. Survivors faced a very different world once the disease mysteriously stopped. Economies by necessity were rearranged from lack of workers, food, and young people, who were disproportionately affected. The average age of death went from maybe 50 down to 30 years of age, for example, for a period of time.

As you can imagine, people went crazy with fear and grief. What is beyond our imagination (unless, gentle reader, you enjoy zombie apocalypse fiction) is the insane (if expected) things people did to ‘protect’ themselves from becoming sick.

Two of the ‘cures’ stood out for me. One was the attempted genocide of Jews. Really? Really. The Jews were blamed in EVERY European country (rumors were passed around that Jews poisoned all of the water wells with plague, but sometimes people just wanted an excuse to rob and loot Jewish property). The other was flagellation associations. Yes. Ok then. A lot of Christian men got together, formed punishment clubs, and went from town to town whipping themselves in obvious ecstasy which increased the longer they flogged themselves. Supposedly, the shredding of their backs, cut to bloody ribbons three times a day (three times!!!!!), would appease God. Why? Many, if not all, believers of Christian faith, believed the Apocalypse had come. It was hoped the self-imposed whipping by volunteers, who were somehow absorbing everyone’s sins upon themselves as they marched along, might make God stop, just stop. In any case, the men were having a lot of fun torturing themselves (religious ecstasy). I suspect, gentle reader, like many history innocents, you thought 'kink clubs' was a thing invented in the 2oth-century, or maybe by 8th-century Shia Muslims (many continue to whip themselves bloody today). Self-flagellation is a well-known common practice of lots of crazy religious people, a quick fact for those not up to speed on religious customs around the world. Actually, the Catholics might have been the first to institutionalize flagellation for self-mortification.

The only thing which irked me is the author enjoyed anthropomorphizing the plague as if it were a black bear scrounging around neighborhoods looking for something to eat. I was extremely annoyed. The book is mostly a dry recital of facts, though, using and quoting from many original sources and historical documents, along with scientists’ and historians’ analyses.

There is a lot of different non-fiction scholastic material here in one book, making it hard to categorize into one box: history, general science, sociology, industry, cultural studies, medicine, travelogue. There are Notes and Index sections, plus my book had interviews with the author.

Nerds will LOVE this book. Women like me might feel a sudden urge to spread some bleach around.

[Anna (Bobs Her Hair)]

If you LOVED Fifty Shades of Grey...


this is not the book for you.

I'm curious about the psychological, sociological, and economical impact the Black Death had on the affected countries. How did it invade their outlook on life, their culture, and how did it impact religion.

[Julian Worker · Rating 5 out of 5]

What better time to read a book on the Black Death than during the Covid Pandemic?

Once you've read this book, you'll be glad you didn't live in the period 1347 - 1450 when the population of Europe probably halved as did China's during a similar period. Florence in Italy had 120,000 citizens in 1330 but only 37,000 in 1450.

The death rate was not just due to the Black Death there were outbreaks of influenza and smallpox as well as lesser outbreaks of plague. There was also bad weather and a few wars in various parts.

If you're feeling sorry for yourself staying at home and having to wear a mask when you go out, well read this book and then understand how well off we are.

The most interesting aspect of this book, and there are many, is what disease was the Black Death? It was plague but it seems to have varied depending on which part of Europe it was found; it was bubonic plague, becoming pneumonic in places, and septicemic in a few spots. It was spread by fleas but not just by rat fleas. This plague travelled at two miles per day on land suggesting humans spread the disease via human fleas and via coughing. No one reported vast rat die-offs either suggesting more than one carrier or vector.

The Russians suspect the Black Death was Marmot Plague, the weapon of choice of Major General Nikolai Urakov, a leader of the USSR's biological weapons program during the Cold War. Marmot plague is probably the deadliest disease on the planet, especially the septicemic version, which is 100% lethal if untreated. If this seems far-fetched, you'll find reports in this book that show people who lay down and died in the street and that pigs collapsed straight after eating clothing worn by a plague victim.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I simply don’t have time right now to adapt this book into a musical, but the dream hasn’t died. I have been fascinated with this topic well before Covid-19 was cooked up. If you are only going to read one book about The Black Plague this year, I totally recommend this one.

Not much of a review, but I just wanted to clear away some clutter on my read-list.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps a little too eurocentric, but generally a compelling account of the Black Death, The Great Mortality does a solid job of accounting for the plague's origin and spread, and the conditions which ultimately allowed it to have such a devastating impact on 14th century society. I especially enjoyed the epilogue covering the debate about what exactly caused the great mortality -- a debate which rumbles on. Having now read this and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century , I'm beginning to think the 14th century might have been the worst time to be alive.

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended by a friend who shares my love of world history. Again, he was correct in assessing this little book as good reading.........I was fascinated by the march of the Black Death as a living entity across the continents of Asia, Europe and beyond (I was surprised that it actually reached Greenland). Utilizing the writings of survivors of the plague and "after the fact" observers, Kelly weaves a tale of unremitting horror, death, suffering and economic chaos as Y pestis struck down almost half the population that it touched.
He follows the Death from the wilds of Mongolia to the fateful journey of the Genoan ship that brought the sickness to the Continent. The story drags and becomes somewhat repetitive in spots as he moves with the plague from city to city. But it is a forgivable sin. The author has done an immense amount of research and in the last chapter he offers the arguments and theories of modern scientists regarding the question..... "was it bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, anthrax, or some unknown illness that died out after its dance of death?" A very interesting and informative telling of one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind.

[K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book because it seemed to coincide so naturally with both my scholastic pursuits and my personal interests. Nevertheless, I expected a textbook-neutral but overall in-depth account of the Black Death that swept across medieval Europe.

I was more than pleasantly surprised. Though I was slightly annoyed at Kelly's anthropomorphising of the disease itself and all the awful metaphors that come with it (the disease takes rest in towns, then goes to attack another "feeling refreshed", it "follows people", et cetera), this book is a highly accessible narrative non-fiction that I could not really put down until I read it cover to cover.

Kelly's comprehensive research shows through with the passion with which he accounts the lives and culture before, during, and after the pandemic passes through "from the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of Portugal". Not only do we get a window into people's lives in various countries before the pandemic, but we get vivid pictures of how the spreading sickness impacted lives and the "end of the world" paranoia that came with it, including a section detailing the anti-Semitic fervor that sprung across Europe as a response to a growing desperation felt throughout different countries. Kelly also discusses the science behind the disease, clearly illustrates probable and possible routes, and gives an idea of how its passing affected religion, science, medicine, industry, culture, and people's general outlook after having survived the horrors of the pandemic. Also included was a glimpse into controversial theories about the plague, including contemporary arguments about what really caused the sickness and comparisons to later plague epidemics.

Anyone wanting to learn about the Black Death and the world it terrorised over the span of a few years would do well to give this book a try.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 4.5. A very thorough history of the plague that ripped across Europe in the 14th century. The misery of those years howls from the pages.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating Clarification: 3.5 Stars

This book had its ups and downs, but overall it was a very informative book for anyone with more then a passing interest in the black death - and hey, who doesn't like reading about black buboes, vomiting, violent pain, abandonment by family/friends, and a lonely death - especially around the Christmas season?

On the plus side, author John Kelly knows his stuff. His book takes the reader to the original ground zero on the Eurasian steppes, and follows the progression of this 14th century plague via the trade routes through the Black Sea, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and through Europe - stopping off in each country with depictions (based on first hand accounts) of the wrath and devastation of Yersinia pestis.

On the minus side, there wasn't alot of immediacy in his book, which is sometimes the case with non-fiction. It was at times a dry and acedemic read, rather then a soulful one. But that's more of a personal quibble, and doesn't detract from what was an interesting read.

[Cynda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I so wanted to like this book. I thought at first my brain was not operating right. Then I kept reading anyway. As an amateur historian, I am sorry to say that Kelly has written ambitious book and thst perhaps the task was too ambitious. The book is poorly organized. I wanted the major rivers of Europe included on the map as the major cities which experienced the plague. I wanted more information about the 3 plagues. I know the first two and know of the 3rd in passing. An Appendix would have given Kelly a place to explain more about the 3 plagues. I appreciate that Kelly wrote of the English peasant's Revolt where they started earning enough money to improve their standard of living. And work became easier with these new innovations. Kelly does speak of these innovations, yet an Appendix would have allowed him space to explain more. While the English peasants revolted, what about peasants in other places? Without explaining about other places, the reader might assume that peasants all revolted about the same time in relatively the same manner. The French peasants did not revolt up until the late 18th century. It took those peasants that long to get so frustrated, so hungry, so unappreciated that they felt the need to eliminate the royalty, nobility, and the wealthy to a large extent. Revolt for the same reason, at a different time, by a different method.
This book is so ambitious and important. I hope that Kelly might review his work, revise, add appendices, and ask a university press to pick it up.
So was there anything good worth noting? Oh yes. Kelly made excellent use of primary sources that required effort to find, had excellent background information through an long list of secondary sources of stellar quality.
I hope very much that Mr Kelly revises his work.

[John Warner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read a couple of historical fiction novels with the Black Death aka the Great Mortality as the book’s backdrop, I picked this book up to read to understand this apocalyptic-like event. Between the years of 1346 and 1353, the Black Death creeped across Eurasia, initially along major trade routes and later inland, killing one-third of the area’s population.

I had to slog through the initial chapters that described the plague cause, Yersinia pestis and its vector, the rat flea, which were carried on rodents such as rats and marmots. However, after this introduction, the author communicated the impact of the pandemic, chapter by chapter as the plague spreads east to west and south to north.

Lacking knowledge of today’s epidemiological studies, a panicked mankind behaved in irrational behaviors including the extermination of groups of people thought to be the cause of the disease, including Jews, lepers and gypsies. Others, believing this calamity to be the act of a vengeful God, hoped to atone for their sins through self-flagellation with whips that might have included metal hooks on the ends.

When the plague burned itself out, its departure triggered major historical changes, including the Renaissance. Clergy, being one the hardest hit group, resulted in citizens believing that the ordained were not needed as a go-between with God sowing the seeds of the Reformation a couple of centuries later. Additionally, the depopulation of the workforce spurred technological advances in the invention of labor-saving devices. One invention included the Guttenberg printing press.

I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the impact of the Black Death and its ramification on public health, society, religion, and technological innovation. This event and its subsequent plague years were true history makers.

[Emma Sea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Topic = 5
Writing = 2

[Patricija || book.duo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

„Vėliau avinjoniečiai patraukė į gatves, į kruvinus, pusiau isteriškus, žvakių nušviestus žygius.“

Nieko neprimena? Aha. Kad istorija linkusi kartotis – visiems aišku, bet kai Viduramžiuose randi daug atgarsių, pažįstamų iš kelių pastarųjų mėnesių istorijos – jau darosi liūdna. Ir jeigu visa Covido situacija jus labai neramina, tai tikriausiai nebūtų geriausias metas imtis skaityti „Juodąją mirtį“. Nesiimsiu spręsti, ar autorius joje istoriškai tikslus, bet viena visiškai aišku – jis išsamus. Mano skoniui kartais net per daug. Knyga smulkmeniškai politiška ir ypač geografinė – daug maro kelių aiškinimo ir sekimo, daug datų ir vardų, daug įžangų į kiekvienos raudonosios (arba juodosios, ha) maro zonos taškų istoriją, valdymo situaciją, prekybinius ryšius. Aš labiau tikėjausi ne nuoseklaus ir truputį sauso pasakojimo, o visokių įdomybių. Jų čia nedaug. Net jei autorius vis bando pajuokauti. Vietomis primena mano mylimą B.Brysoną, bet iki jo netempia. Ir kai kurie bajeriai čiut nejaukūs, atrodo pritempti – na, kam kažkokią n šimtų metų atgal gyvenusią moteriškę lyginti su auksinio Holivudo amžiaus aktorėmis dėl jos išvaizdos? Kam spėlioti, ką galvojo kokio nors nuo maro mirusio vado motina?

Knyga kiek prailgsta, bet gausu joje ir įdomybių – man buvo nežinomas ypač aštrus antisemitizmo aspektas maro metais. Prajuokino ir „Nieko neprimena? Nr.2“ momentą sukėlė skyrius apie maro NEIGĖJUS. Žodžiu, įdomių aspektų pakankamai, kad knygos skaitymo nesigailėčiau, bet ne tiek, kad rekomenduočiau ne tikram maro geek‘ui – ekspertams turbūt bus per daug paviršiumi ir spekuliacijomis, o mėgėjams gali būti sausoka. Man trūko medicininių aspektų, maro daktarų gyvenimo (yra čia medicininių įdomybių, bet dažnai su maru net nesusijusių), o keli perskaityti atsiliepimai apie knygos šlykštumą sukėlė šypseną – nė per kur knygos nepavadinčiau išsamiai šlykščia. Tiesą sakant, visokių nemalonių detalių man netgi pritrūko. Dideli, menkai išskirstyti teksto blokai vietomis versdavo pamesti minties siūlo galą, bet padėjo įvertinti vertėjos darbą – čia tikrai buvo ką veikti, o J.Žąsinaitė net savo paaiškinimų pridėjo daugiau, nei šiaip būtų įprasta – pagarba jai. Viskas su knyga ok, bet su lūkesčiu vietomis prasilenkė.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is the literary equivalent of a painting of a pile of corpses done by Lisa Frank. John Kelly works super hard to be whimsical and cutesy, and unfortunately, he succeeds far too often. As a result, his book is frequently downright silly and embarrassing.

I cringed as Kelly repeatedly anthropomorphizes both Y. pestis and the plague it caused, as in "Descending through the straits, Y. pestis stopped to pay its respects to Xerxes, the Persian king who built a bridge of boats to ferry his army across the waterway [of the Dardanelles]" (82). How? How did the bacterium stop to "pay its respects"? Kelly doesn't explain, doesn't bother to think through the metaphor he's trying to establish.

It gets worse: Kelly also attributes modern political sensibilities to the plague: "In a fit of anti-unionist frenzy, the pestilence also struck down the leaders of many of [London's] powerful trade guilds" (216), he writes, or "Y. pestis turns out to have been something of a feminist" (286), after explaining how the economic upheaval caused by the destruction of third or more of a society's labor force opened up opportunities for women. Ugh! It's not just that Kelly conflates a consequence with an intention; it's that he has to dress it up in anachronism, instead of letting the information carry its own weight, and as a result, he consistently undercuts the significance of his material.

The book spends quite a bit of time discussing anti-Semitism, the frequency with which Jews were blamed for the plague, and the vicious, abominable violence against them. Mercifully, at no point does Kelly try to lighten up his work by turning anti-Semitism into an entity that can stop and pay its respects to this or that historical figure, or have this or that cutesy twentieth/twenty-first-century motive for its movements and activities. Which is a good thing, because it would be completely gross.

Kelly does, however, includes lots of gratuitous, pointless, and outdated culture references: "In a film about a race to identify Y. pestis, Leslie Howard would have played Yersin" (42). Seriously? OK, yeah, I know who Leslie Howard is, but he died in 1953. Kelly couldn't think of an actor more recent that him? He describes Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily as "a combination of Scarlett O'Hara and Lizzie Borden" (91). What? Joanna was accused of murdering her husband; Lizzie Borden was a spinster accused of murdering her father and rotten stepmother.

It's a disappointment and a mess of a book, especially when compared to something like The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, a book that actually explains a pandemic successfully. I don't quite know how I finished The Great Mortality, and I'm a bit irritated that I bothered.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Compelling Melding of Science & History, with Lessons for Today

As I sit writing this review, the world is once again ravaged by disease (COVID-19) that is killing thousands around the globe and forcing millions of others to shelter in their homes and pray that this illness would pass over them. So, to say that reading this book about the Black Death, the plague that ravaged Europe
in the middle of the fourteenth century, is timely would be an understatement. The past can be both teacher and guide in times like these.

One of the great things about this book is how it is not just a recounting of death, though there is plenty of that to be had in these pages. The first few chapters and the afterword are devoted to understanding just what kind of a disease the Plague was. So, on top of reading a thorough history about how the Plague decimated the Eurasian continent, you will have better scientific understanding of the disease itself, where it originated from, and how it spread and killed.

Of course, Mr. Kelly uses the majority of his narrative to describe the when and where the Plague struck Europe and how it left a wake of human destruction in its path. Through the use of the best statistical information available as well as the numerous contemporary accounts that were written at the time, Mr. Kelly’s history is both incredibly thorough and accessible. There is something for both the hardcore historian and the layman to like in this book. At times, it even seems a little excessive. Mr. Kelly devotes two chapters to the Plague’s rampage through England when probably one chapter would have done.

Mr. Kelly does not restrict his history to the disease’s destruction. Mr. Kelly also points out how the Black Death affected society in several negative ways. One of the most horrendous and heartbreaking portions of this book is about the number of pogroms committed against Europe’s Jewish populations that would presage the Holocaust in a number of horrifying ways. Just as COVID-19 is unleashing a wave of anti-Asian American bigotry right now, so too did the Plague unleash a wave of virulent and violent anti-semitism, though the currently bigotry against Asian-Americans is nowhere near as violent as the Plague pogroms were.

By the time the Plague dissipated, the tinder of overpopulation, resource strain, climate change and religious & intellectual stagnation that defined Europe in the years prior to its arrival would all be burned away, paving the way for the Renaissance, the Reformation, and modern Europe. By chronicling this critical period in world history, Mr. Kelly has given us a wonder picture of both the medieval era and the calamitous disease that signaled the beginning of its end. It also holds up a mirror to our own time and warns us that virulent disease, if left unchecked, can easily devastate human civilization. Whether you are living in a time of disease yourself or not, you owe it to yourself to read this book about one of the greatest natural disasters to befall humanity.

[John Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this quarantine ends, I really am going to be insufferable around people as I drop little bits of trivia from books like this. Did you know that people used to inhale the air at pit toilets because they thought it would build immunity? Did you know that in The Decameron people went partying during the plague just like the spring breakers in Florida? Did you know that medieval people burned Jews alive because they thought they were the cause of the plague? I apologize to the recipients of my future interactions.

[GoldGato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many books have been written about the Black Death, but this one now jumps to the forefront of my little morbid collection. Written with an intriguing historical narrative that explains the state of politics and culture as Death swept into Europe circa 1348, this is an excellent volume to enhance one's curiosity about the 14th-century Plague.

"Oimmeddam" is a word from the Pima Indians of the American Southwest, roughly translated to "wandering sickness". The Black Death remains the most successful example of "Oimmeddam" in human history.

I bring death. My breath causes children to wither and die like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No people who looks upon me is ever the same.

Starting among the wild Marmot population of the Asian Steppes, the Black Death first moved westward with its rats and fleas, progressing firmly but within the limits of its hosts. By the time it reached Europe, a mutation had already occurred, allowing the Plague to evolve into an airborne killer that outraced the rats and fleas. The plague bacillus swallowed Asia and Europe like a snake swallowing a rabbit, whole, virtually in a single setting. It's now estimated that the death rate in Europe was around 33% overall, meaning close to 25 million of 75 million residents lost their lives. Again, that was just Europe. Using this as a main point, author John Kelly takes the reader on a journey beyond the usual description of the victims to illustrate how the catastrophe affected everyday life.

There was a crowd of us, now we are almost alone.

While we think of the Black Death for its black buboes, it was the rattling noise in the lungs that sounded like a heavy iron chain which meant certain death. Nuns had the highest mortality rate, as they were the ones who administered to the sick, thus dying days later themselves. Entire communities of Jewish people were wiped out by their Christian neighbors, who blamed the disease on the Jews and burned them alive to drive out the evil spirits. The Catholic Church lost so many priests, that its already dissolute leaders slid further into the mire by admitting men into the Church who were rapists, criminals, and thieves, thus setting up the future Protestant revolution.

Clement V and his successors transformed the Church into a spiritual Pez dispenser.

There is much to learn here, even though it's been explained in other books. He does come up with some valid points, such as noting that since fleas really do prefer the unwashed, the human flea was just as responsible for spreading the disease as the rat flea. And the medieval human was filthy. Just reading about the polluted water and streets filled with sewage and runoff from slaughtered animals...well, don't read this while eating. I think I liked John Kelly's writing, which goes beyond the usual chronological overview and takes the reader on a travelogue with the bacillus as it makes it way northward from its initial Sicilian landing point.

"Fatalist" Sicily
There is the violence of the island's sky, which is too blue; of its sun, which is too bright; of its people, who are too passionate; and of its wind, the piercing summer sirocco, which blows northward across the Mediterranean from Tunisia and stings the eyes, burns the throat, and coats the lungs with sand.

"Sharp-Elbowed" Marseille
If venality was common in Marseille, so was a kind of dogged, undemonstrative resolve. Though it was struck soon after Sicily, Marseille did not collapse into panic or social breakdown. The singular achievement of Black Death Marseille was to resist the wave of anti-Semitism and remain true to its Mediterranean heritage of tolerance.

"Babylon Of The West" Avignon
Residents boasted that while the Holy City had only two whorehouses, Avignon had eleven.

"Solid, Undemonstrative" England
Undoubtedly, the average Englishman found the mortality as frightening as the average Florentine or Parisian, but a phlegmatic, self-contained streak in the English character kept outbursts...relatively infrequent.

All in all, a fascinating read, thanks to the author's presentation. As I turned the pages, I realized that even when the cities knew the Plague was on its way, there was not much to be done. For all it needed to establish itself was that narrow hour between not knowing and knowing.

Book Season = Autumn (mournful dirges)

[Susanna - Censored by GoodReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating about 3.5 stars.

Very interesting account. Kelly writes with verve, and tells some great stories, but has a couple of tics as a writer which annoyed me, the most prominent being personifying the plague as if it were a living, decision-making animal.

Kelly covers how it came to Europe (the chroniclers of the time universally blamed the Genoese), and tracks it scrupulously through Italy, France and England. Scandinavia gets barely a mention, as does Iberia (except for how it treated its Jews; that 15,000 or 20,000 people died in Barcelona is almost a side note), and Germany is covered almost entirely by either what the Germans did beforehand (it's the Jews poisoning our wells, so let's kill as many as we can find before we are affected by this horrible international conspiracy), or as the heartland of the Flagellants during the height of the Black Death. Eastern Europe gets bare mention, as is also the case with Russia.

He also discusses what exactly was the cause of the Black Death. It's pretty clear the virus was Yersinia pestis (French scientists have found its DNA in the death pits), but what flea spread it? (The question remains open.) Why did it behave differently from subsequent outbreaks? (That question, too, remains open.)

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is known by many names but the Great Mortality of the 14th century (also often referred to as The Black Death) was supposed to be the second pandemic of recorded history, the first one being the Plague of Justinian which ravaged the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire in 541-542 AD, and the third one that of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. Of course, the present one is not in this book since it was published in 2005 and it contains a very hopeful dedication which reads:

“FOR SUZANNE, JONATHAN AND SOFIYA—TO A FUTURE WITHOUT PLAGUE”


I read this (with almost 400 pages) in less than two days, mesmerized. For unlike the first book I’ve read about this second pandemic (Christopher Wills, Plagues: Their Origin, History and Future), this one made 14th century Europe alive and it gave me the privilege of knowing some of the personalities (both the renowned and the obscure) who had lived and died during these times, 700 or so years ago.

How was this possible? Apparently, some Europeans of this period were meticulous record keepers (especially the English and the Italians). And these records are surprisingly still extant up to now. So from papers like bills of sale, wills, receipts, court records, notarized documents registry of deaths and births, etc. the author gave us both the general and personal histories of this horrific event.

The estimates of the casualties vary, from the low of 30% to the high of 60% dead among Europe’s then inhabitants. But whether 30% or 60%, I could translate this bland statistic into something easier on the imagination: let us say my country, the Philippines, now has a population of 100 million souls (it actually has more). Then suppose it would end up having 30 MILLION dead from Covid 19. That would approximately be something like having dead family members in every household. THAT was The Great Mortality, most likely even worse.

Entire families, in fact, perished. It’s like you have your neighbours now in the street or subdivision where you live and then after the pandemic several houses in your neighbourhood would become empty, all their previous dwellers having been taken to the hospital, then to the morgue for cremation. One chronicler had written about having buried his wife and their five children, all victims of the plague, with his own hands (it is not clear if he also died afterwards).

The dead were everywhere, some eaten by dogs and pigs (which also died en masse). Those who were buried in common graves were stacked up like lasagnas.


Then, as now, the people sought succour from God and his saints—to no avail. Like this one about two Italian cities, a Roman Catholic saint, and her holy relics:


“The tale of the Black Death in Sicily ia also a tale of two cities, Messina and its southern neighbor, Catania. Believing the Messinese to be vain and supercilious, the Catanians had long disliked their swaggering northern neighbors, and when the town became a collection point for refugees from the port, relations between the two cities soured further. ‘Don’t talk to me if you are from Messina,’ wary townsfolk told the refugees. The Messinese, whose reputation for vanity was not entirely unjustified, did not enhance their standing by promptly asking to borrow Catania’s most precious relics, the bones of the blessed virgin St. Agatha. The Catanians were aghast. Even by the standards of Messinese cheek, this was outrageous. Who would protect Catania from the pestilence while St. Agatha was in the north helping the Messinese drive the plague from the native city? Even Friar Michele becomes a little unhinged when he describes the request. ‘What a stupid idea on the part of you Messinese…Don’t you think if she (St. Agatha) wanted to make her home in Messina she would have said so?’.

The crisis deepened when Catania’s patriarch, Gerard Ortho, experienced a fit of guilt. Under public pressure, the patriarch had agreed to ban Messinese refugeees from the city. Now, to appease God and his conscience, not only did he let the refugees talk to him into lending them St. Agatha’s relics, he promised to carry the relics to Messina himself. Again, Catania was aghast. The patriarch seemed to be imposing a form of unilateral spiritual disarmament on the city. An angry crowd quickly gathered and marched on the cathedral. On every other day, Catanians addressed their patriarch on bended knee and with bowed head, but not on this day, with the city under imminent threat from a horrible disease. On this day the marchers spoke truth to power. Confronting the patriarch inside the cathedral, they told him flatly, ’They would rather see him dead before they let the relics go to Messina.’ A man of moral courage, Patriarch Ortho insisted on keeping his word to the Messinese. Finally a compromise was struck. Messina would not get St. Agatha’s relics, but it would get the next best thing: holy water into which the relics had been dipped—Patriarch Ortho would sprinkle the water over the infected city himself.

“Like almost all stories about Sicily in the autumn of 1347, the tale of two cities ends badly. Despite the holy water, the plague continued to rage in Messina; despite St. Agatha’s relics, Catania was struck by the pestilence; and despite a close association with two most important symbols of Sicilian spirituality, Patriarch Ortho died a terrible plague death.”

Then too, as now, also in desperation, the people sought for a cure. Perhaps the most outlandish was the one proposed by one physician named John Colle who said, following the belief that the plague was airborne and observing that undertakers and those who cared for the sick had seldom been infected, that it can be cured by inhaling foul air. The fouler it is, the more effective. So the sick flocked to municipal latrines and competed in inhaling the noxious fumes coming from human waste. Of course this didn’t work. The cadavers continued piling up.

With so dark a subject the author often managed to invest wry humor upon the subject. I had to blink several times, for example, about this supposed “interview” of some of the London victims by archeologists before I realised what the “interview” actually meant:


“However, the only people who know firsthand what happened in Black Death London are the dead, and not long ago they were interviewed by a group of British archeologists. In the mid-1980’s, as rush-hour traffic whizzed by overhead, the archeologists descended into a plague pit dozens of feet below the modern city. If a measure of a civilised society is the ability to bury its dead with dignity, then evidence from the plague pit suggests that civilisation held in London.

“The mixture of caskets, shrouds, individual graves, and trenches at the site indicates that on days when the dying was light, an effort was made to observe traditional burial rites; people got individual graves and some kind of funeral. Even on days when the death carts came back full and there was no time for ritual, bodies were not simply tossed willy-nilly into a pit. Some of the plague dead in the trenches were buried in caskets and shrouds, and everyone was laid out the same way: side by side, heads to the west, feet to the east. An effort may even have been to segregate plague victims by age and gender. When archeologists excavated the middle section of one trench, dozens of London children gazed up into English sky for the first time in seven hundred years.”


One disappointment though: I had been hoping that the final chapter would be something about how, when, or why (even merely the probable reasons) the plague ended. But there was no such chapter. Maybe no one knows how and why the plague disappeared. Maybe plagues and epidemics are just like wild animals which stop gorging on human blood when they are already full.

[Annika · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sudden, random interest in the black death made me pick up this book on an impulse. It's the first I've ever read on the topic and apparently the only one I'll ever need to read. The author paints such a detailed history of the 14th century and includes a surprising amount of context around the decades leading up to (and following) the plague. A bit long winded at points but worth it in the end.

[Susan in NC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very evocative, well-researched look at the movement of the Black Plague throughout Europe in the 14th century.

I read this book for a Book For All Seasons group challenge to read a book about a pandemic, and this seemed like a good choice, as the 1918 flu pandemic was already covered by another member! Kelly’s Afterword was very relatable, as he says it became depressing to research and write about death on such a large scale — and with many states, including mine, cautiously peeking our noses out of pandemic quarantine and also facing widespread protests, I was at first engrossed, but skimmed the last two chapters. I was finding it depressing to read about the relentless misery, and although I appreciated learning more about the period and the pandemic that wiped out possibly a third of the European population (numbers differ), and its aftermath, there’s just too much going on right now, between the current pandemic, and now protests. I need a break from misery!

Kelly’s writing style and use of primary sources really brought the subject and suffering to life, and as bad as Coronavirus is, the plague seemed even more vicious and insidious, for the speed it traveled and the mortality rate it left in its wake. Also, due to the medieval mindset that the plague was somehow a punishment from God, it was seen as a prophylactic measure by some countries to kill their Jewish populations to please the Almighty. I’ve read several books set in the early Middle Ages, so the anti-Semitism was not a total surprise, but the accounts of the atrocities just added to the sadness and misery.

I enjoy reading history to learn, and Kelly does an entertaining and thorough job explaining the likely source of the plague bacillus on the steppes of Eastern Europe, and the possible vectors that brought it to Europe. He also makes extensive use of primary sources to make a distant time and place seem very immediate and relatable to modern readers, and illustrate that much has changed through the centuries, most importantly, perhaps, medical knowledge and sanitation standards. I wasn’t always a fan of his almost anthropomorphizing the plague bacillus, referring to it pausing or taking the season off (as if it were on vacation), but this did serve to emphasize how insidious and frightening the inevitable progress through Europe was. People could only listen to rumors, and pray, and wait for it to arrive. As Kelly notes in the first chapter, “The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, seven hundred years after the fact, retains the power to move, astonish, and haunt.”

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the "Black Death" as well as digressions into topics of marginal relevance. One topic glossed over in a sentence was the "Sweating Sickness" — a series of epidemics following the Black Death. (The nature of the Sweating Sickness is still unknown, so perhaps there was not much to talk about there).

Kelly does discuss competing theories about the Black Death, picking apart various arguments that it was not the plague but caused by some other factor.

This book is based upon a massive amount of research (five years!) so it is at times extremely detailed. That can be both good or bad, depending on what the reader is looking for.

One or two of the less relevant digressions I had to skip (25 pages), and therefore am rating this 4 stars, where a more tightly focused narrative would have warranted all the stars.

[Ginny Messina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Packed to the brim with details and stories about life in the Middle Ages, and the horrifying Black Death. It was pretty fascinating to learn about the origins of the Plague and the theories about how it spread to and through Europe. The book could have used some better editing, though. Lots of repetition in general--sometimes pretty much verbatim--and, amazingly, I was actually starting to get sort of bored with the Bubonic Plague by the end. If you love the plague, though (and who doesn’t?) this is well worth reading, or at least dipping into.

[Kennedy Wagner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am this book’s biggest hater.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read a recently published book about the medieval plague in Europe and this seems to be the one to read. Because this pandemic occurred long before modern medicine or even wide acceptance of the scientific method, I knew it would necessarily be heavily weighted toward the human aspect rather than the scientific aspect. The author says regretfully that he has to write a little about the science behind the plague, and I kind of regret it, too, because he is TERRIBLE at writing about science. He really, really should have brought on a collaborator for the first couple of chapters, or at least found an editor with some background in biology. Now I do not have any sort of specialized knowledge about the bubonic plague or epidemics thereof which is why I decided to read this pop-sci/history book. However, I caught a lot of misinformation and I decided to start keeping a list of things that caught my attention and I did some light internet fact checking. For my own strange and petty reasons, I shall include the list at the end of this review.

I got the idea that Kelly would much rather be writing about the medieval period in general than the plague specifically. Most notably, he spent an unnecessary number of pages describing the state of the papacy in the 14th century.

The contents of the book became repetitive. He mentioned--and even briefly described--the scandal of Queen Joanna, the death of Princess Joan, and the disturbing practice of the Flagellants multiple times before telling their stories more thoroughly. This kind of signposting seems weird for a work of nonfiction. (Incidentally, I'd almost welcome flagellants trying to solve the current pandemic through their misguided pain. Makes much more sense than all the denial we've seen. Also, I guess the Schadenfreude is strong with me.)

As noted by others, Kelly has a rather overheated way of expressing information. So much dramatic description of how things sounded, from the ringing of axes in the forests to moans echoing through cities to the neverending tattoo of rain on thatched roofs. In addition, Kelly is also careless about the way he phrases things. For example, some of the conspiracy theory stuff is (hopefully unintentionally) expressed as fact. He refers to "Victorian San Francisco." (I don't care if that is done in certain circles, the only thing Victorian about SF--even in the time of that distant monarch--is some of the architecture.) He uses the problematic words "Jewess" and "leper" in his own (not quoted) text.

I would have appreciated some sense of what surviving a bout of plague looked like, and any estimates of how many people managed this feat. Modern persons of Eurasian descent are certainly descended from some survivors of plague, not just avoiders of plague. It is of interest.

Finally, I would like to condemn Kelly's sneering tone when, in the afterword, he discusses theories that the Black Death may not have been plague. A person who makes so many errors in his discussion of science (see below) has no call to be so dismissive of people who actually know something about disease.

List of bad science info
--Kelly lists a number of rodent species that are unlucky enough to be the main victims of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis. At the top of the list is turbots. A turbot is a type of fish. (I checked and could find no rodent also called a turbot.)
--Claim that unwashed persons attract more fleas. I found nothing to substantiate that claim, although for unknown reasons, some humans do seem to be more attractive to fleas than others. I would find it easy to believe that persons who don't wash retain more fleas (and, especially, their eggs, pupae, and larvae) once they come into contact with them. I would be similarly inclined to believe that the people who come in frequent contact with fleas might also tend to bathe less, especially in the middle ages. Correlation, not causation.
--Claim that in medieval urban settings, rat colonies would divide their attention between many different residences. I'd like to see the peer-reviewed articles from the 14th century, please. Perhaps urban rats behave this way in modern times but without some sort of rodent-obsessed medieval Samuel Pepys, we don't know that this was always the case.
--Repeated implications that rodent populations (and human and bacterial populations) are governed by some sort of nearly intelligent deterministic Malthusian process. For example, a claim that plague epidemics among rodents come about because they are needed to control rodent populations. No. They may come about as a result of increasing population density, but nature does not care if a population of rats (or people) starves in its entirety or is only almost wiped out by disease. Both happen in nature.
--Claim that Y. pestis can elude human and flea antigens. First, I think he means antibodies (the bacterial material constitutes the antigens in this scenario), however, it is just possibly a reference to human leucocyte antigen proteins (which are also not antigens in this scenario--to my limited understanding, they function to present foreign antigens to the immune system), in which case, he should have specified HLA proteins. (For the human case. Not sure what the fleas have in this department.) Either way, how is this "evasion" accomplished? A detailed technical description isn't needed, but it is a big claim and he should have dropped a specific citation.
--Sunspots are over-implicated in scientific literature as the cause of decadally repeating phenomena. He should have included that caveat when invoking sunspots.
--Information he presents on long term climate change is... weird. Cites a conversation he had with P. Stott, a non-expert whose views on modern anthropogenic climate change are considerably outside the norm. In a book that is not about climate change, Kelly should have communicated current prevailing views, not those of an iconoclast. (I'm not saying Stott is entirely wrong, just that there was no reason for Kelly to insert his 'global warming ain't so bad' sentiment into a footnote.)
--Abbreviates the scientific name of the species Rattus rattus to just its generic name, Rattus. The proper abbreviation would be R. rattus especially since Kelly is distinguishing it from its relative, Rattus norvegicus, to which he refers as its "first cousin." Uh, no. He does fine abbreviating Yersinia pestis to Y. pestis (in fact, he overuses that abbreviation) so I don't know why he has a problem properly referring to rats. Very basic information that any editor with a bit of science knowledge would have caught.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some morbide reason im very intruied to read about plague. Like a realistic horror trope.