Black Death

Introducing Global Pandemics: a cutting-edge, browser-based, digital learning experience—designed to enhance student understanding of the role of pandemics in world history. One year in the making, and involving a talented, interdisciplinary team from around the world—the new product features cutting-edge digital learning design, web animation, interaction design, and digital storytelling. 

Explore Plague of Athens now!
Experience our fully animated, interactive web app on desktop Chrome browser!
https://pandemics.historyadventures.app/

History Adventures: Global Pandemics
Presenting Chapter 1: “To Do No Harm,” the story of Nikos of Athens, a physician during the Plague of Athens, 429 BCE, who struggles to treat the multitude who fall ill during this world-upending ordeal, causing him to question everything he holds dear, from his faith in Apollo, healer under the gods, to the meaning of his Hippocratic Oath, and what is truly at stake in medical ethics.

Interactive Digital Storytelling
The Global Pandemics prototype consists of over 50 uniquely designed, animated web pages featuring over 2 hours of engaging, rewarding learning material for students to explore. The product combines digital storytelling with interactive learning design to craft a rich, complex pedagogical experience that immerses students in the power of story—narrativizing the experiences of diverse people, around the globe, who lived through history’s worst pandemics—interwoven with rich, multimodal learning content.

Applied Educational Research
Global Pandemics provides historical context for students about the challenges COVID-19 has presented to people around the world. The design of Global Pandemics is positioned at the nexus of innovative pedagogical, theoretical, and technological practices—including narrative studies, multimodal literacies, and game-based learning research. Synthesizing the best of history games, visual learning, interactive textbooks, and history apps, Global Pandemics introduces novel features, design elements, and affordances—demonstrating the effectiveness of applied educational research to enhance learning outcomes. The central question posed is whether—and to what degree—the innovative digital learning design of Global Pandemics will result in a measurable increase in student interest, engagement, and understanding of key concepts in epidemiology as well as the role of pandemics in world history. A secondary question is how to iterate product design to improve engagement and successful learning outcome metrics even further.

Global Pandemics, Chapter 1: “To Do No Harm,”
Plague of Athens, 4th Century BCE

Building on a rich tradition of digital media and learning research, Global Pandemics immerses and engages students through meaningful choice and multimodal interaction design; provide systems-based interpretations that emphasize complexity, interdependencies, and causal connections; played out within a problem space that encourages students to perceive connections between past and present—making that understanding more visceral, tangible, and real—and in the process sparking enthusiasm for learning about the past. Global Pandemics offers an innovative solution for engaging millennial students and inspiring curiosity for learning about history.

This browser-based digital learning experience introduces multiple novel technologies, including:
3D Motion Design to Recreate History
Advanced Web Animation to Simulate Pathogens
Immersive 360 Panoramas of Historical Locations
Animated Historical Timeline & Maps
Choice-based Narrative Design
Interactive Original Historical Documents
Media-Rich Adaptive Assessments

Created by Spencer Striker, PhD
Digital Media Design Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar

Tags
#digitallearning #digital #education #innovation #anthemawards #WebbyAwards #worldhistory #peopleshistory #connectedlearning #curiosity #animation #exploration #revolution #othersideofhistory #narrativedesign #interactiondesign #GamesBasedLearning #chooseyourownadventure #worldofcharacters #jamespaulgee

Throughout the history of African societies, pandemics have claimed, in some instances more lives than warfare. Africa is susceptible to many pandemics. Given the state of underdevelopment amongst African nation-states characterised by low levels of education, poor health care facilities, lack of basic infrastructure, poverty, low levels of income, lack of skilled health care workers, and many more factors, it is not sufficiently equipped to handle pandemics that are life-threatening. Hence, it is prone to outbreaks of infectious diseases. Pandemics cause the socio-economic crisis, which in turn affects political stability. In the history of Africa, the Ebola disease, HIV/Aids, Cholera are some of the major diseases that have ravished nation-states in contemporary times. Now, just like other parts of the world, it has to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic that has far-reaching consequences. This article seeks to interrogate the nature and causes of major pandemics in the globe and the ...

Over the last 20 years, several plague mass graves have been unearthed in France, thus enhancing our knowledge of historical plague pandemics. Moreover, recent archaeo-anthropological and palaeoimmunological investigations have shown that abrupt

Published by The Viking Society for Northern Research.
Available from the following vendors:
Bookfinder: http://bit.ly/3qQhn7f
Foyles: http://bit.ly/3qQyy8E
Waterstones: http://bit.ly/2NrgvaI

As well as the distributor: https://www.gazellebookservices.co.uk/GazelleBooks/Home.pgm

Freely available online in 2024: http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk

Blurb:
In the summer of 1350, as a deadly pandemic tore across Europe, nine people were burnt at the stake in the Hanseatic city of Visby on the island of Gotland. Ostensibly, this was a sadly familiar story: the Black Death was rampant, and a supposed Jewish plot was offered as an explanation. The alleged perpetrators were forced to confess, and were duly executed. But the people who were consigned to the flames in Visby were not Jewish. In fact, there were no Jews on the island to be victimised. Of the nine accused, two were Christian preachers, and the only named individual, Tidericus, was an organista - probably the organ player at the church of St. Olaf in Visby. The outlandish theory was that the plague was a poisoning scheme run by an international conspiracy of Jews, oligarchs and secular administrators.

This book traces the story of the unfortunate Tidericus, and examines the implications of the antisemitic fantasy which led to his death. The positions of the different ethnic groups in Visby is considered against the backdrop of panic and paranoia which pandemics inspire. The interests of the native Old Gutnish-speaking population are compared to the motives of the Low German-speaking mercantile elite who were administering Visby at the time. A context of social unrest, with class divisions bisecting proto-national identities, proved to be a dangerous fuel for a surreal conspiracy theory. A popular willingness to believe in this lurid nightmare proved to be the undoing of Tidericus and his co-accused. The sources which record the affair, namely two pieces of Hanseatic correspondence, are edited and translated into English for the first time in the appendices.

Published by The Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 2020. 119 pp. ISBN 978-0-903521-99-4. £10 (£5 for Viking Society members). Order from sales@gazellebooks.co.uk. State Viking Society membership to qualify for members’ price.

This article provides an overview of economic inequality in Germany from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. It builds upon data produced by the German Historical School, which from the late nineteenth century pioneered inequality studies, and adds new archival information for selected areas. Inequality tended to grow during the early modern period, with an exception: the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), together with the 1627-29 plague, seem to have caused a temporary but significant phase of inequality reduction. This is in contrast to other European areas, from Italy to the Low Countries, where during 1500-1800 inequality growth was monotonic. Some evidence of a drop in inequality is also found after the Black Death of 1348-49. Our findings contribute to deepen and nuance our knowledge of long-term inequality trends in preindustrial Europe, and offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present.

This essay was originally drafted for inclusion in the *Isis Critical Bibliography*, published by the History of Science Society, which had embarked on a Pandemics special issue. This essay is a complement to one on epidemic diseases in Afro-Eurasia, which (in its second version) focused mostly on plague. Together, the essays had two main objectives: to explain why the entry of "palaeosciences" was transforming the field of infectious disease history, and to show how findings from genetics were bringing new perspectives to the questions historians ask about disease histories in the pre-modern world. This essay looks at the question of what diseases were exported from the Old World to the Americas and Oceania in the period around 1500--and what diseases were already present.

Both essays were withdrawn from the *Isis* project in 2022 because the editor failed to follow the normal procedures of peer review. The present essay can be cited as Monica H. Green, "The Great Dying: The Epidemiological and Medical Implications of Old and New World Encounters in the Pre- and Post-Contact Eras," 10 June 2021, Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/49232098.

The "companion" essay on plague was rewritten and appeared as: Monica H. Green, "A New Definition of the Black Death: Genetic Findings and Historical Interpretations,” De Medio Evo 11, no. 2 (2022), 139-55, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/dmae.83788.

I welcome comments via email (monica.h.green@gmail.com).

With his solemn canonisation in 1450, Bernardin of Siena was officially presented as a model for preachers and as a re-founder of the Franciscan Order. His tireless commitment to preaching and his virtues as a friar made him a perfect model for the religious. However, his life before entering the Franciscans permitted to present him also as a saint in which the lay people could find an inspiring example for their own lives. This paper highlights this less studied aspect of the formation and evolution of the cult of St Bernardin by considering the earliest Vitae and sermons in honour of this saint as well as a peculiar cycle of frescos in Lodi. This allows to investigate in which way the hagiographical image of St Bernardin’s adolescence and youth was constructed, which episodes of his life in seculo received more attention and which virtues were put at the forefront. It emerges a vivid and multifaceted portray of a felix adulescentia, in which piety and charity had a central role in shaping the profile of the new saint, whose life was strictly connected with both the love of the Virgin and the active service in the city. In this way, the paper shows that St Bernardin was not only presented as a perfect preacher, but also as a perfect layman who lived with charity and chastity in the secular world.

Los videojuegos de contenido histórico son cada vez más recurrentes dentro de las plataformas de distribución digitales. La interactividad que permite el medio, las novedosas formas de aproximación al discurso histórico, las representaciones de distintos contextos históricos, el rol que le cabe al jugador como partícipe de "la Historia", y otras tantas dimensiones del ámbito videolúdico comenzaron a ser los nuevos objetos de estudio de una nueva forma de hacer Historia. Hablamos del campo de los historical game studies, que ha tenido notables avances desde su nacimiento en el año 2005. Es así que en este artículo proponemos un análisis de la representación del brote de Peste Negra del año 1348 en el videojuego A Plague Tale: Innocence. Ya que los distintos elementos presentes en el videojuego contribuyen a la construcción de un paisaje de muerte y angustia, intentaremos observar cómo una clásica obra en el estudio del miedo en la historia, El miedo en Occidente de Jean Delumeau, puede ser adaptada a una realidad digital que puede ser vivida por quien quiera hacerlo (o jugarla).

Palabras clave: Videojuegos, representación histórica, game studies, Peste Negra, miedo

This post, on the Arc-Medieval, Global Medieval Studies blog, recounts my experiences teaching my undergraduate course, "The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World." Over the course of the past decade and a half, there has been a radical change in scientific understandings of the evolution and spread of *Yersinia pestis*, the causative organism of plague. This course is based on the idea that that evolutionary history can also serve as the foundation for an epidemiological and cultural history of plague, a disease that has spread in just 2000 years to all the continents of the world (save Antartica). The course focuses on the most awful plague pandemic, the Black Death, but it examines it within the whole global history of plague up to the present day. The blog includes links both to the complete syllabus and to other resources we used throughout the semester.

Between the years 1346 and 1353 CE, a terrible disease swept across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, bringing death and desolation in its wake. This widespread epidemic, now known as the “Black Death”, caused dramatic losses, surpassing those of any large-scale disaster recorded before. In Europe, the disease killed an estimated 30–60% of the population over a 5-year period. Its impact elsewhere in the Old World is not as well-known, but historical evidence suggests massive depopulation as well. By causing such a large demographic collapse, the Black Death initiated or enhanced major social, economic, and political changes throughout Western Eurasia and Northern Africa. It also constituted the starting point of a period of high mortality, marked by recurrent outbreaks of the disease over the next four centuries. Due to its many effects on society and culture, the Black Death is generally considered as one of the most significant events of the late medieval world and as a turning point in European history.

The Black Death (1347–1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.

An excavation carried out in 2007 in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse (Aude-Languedoc, southern France), revealed a medieval rural cemetery used during the 8th–14th centuries. One hundred and forty nine graves were identified. Amongst those, three burials radiocarbon dated to the 14th century contained the remains of several individuals. No paleotraumatological evidences of violence due to warfare or to a civil massacre were identified in the exhumed skeletons. Therefore, we hypothesized that the simultaneous inhumations could have occurred during the “Black Death” outbreak or during one of its resurgences. A rapid diagnostic test for the detection of Yersinia pestis F1 antigen was applied to the nine putative plague victims to authenticate the cause of their death. Seven of the nine individuals tested from the three graves were positive to Y. pestis F1 antigen. We additionally tested fourteen skeletons from single graves archaeologically dated to the 13th–14th centuries. Four of them were positive to Y. pestis F1 antigen, thus showing a higher mortality rate due to plague than originally expected. The Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse plague victims are the oldest samples from which Y. pestis F1 antigen has been, hitherto, identified. Few rural French cemetery containing plague victims have previously been identified and amongst them, only one dates to the 14th century. In the present report, we provide suggestive evidence of a second rural cemetery from southern France where victims of Y. pestis infection were buried. Our findings provide new information about the management of the plagued corpses during the “Black Death” in small rural communities.

This course examines the interconnected medieval worlds of Europe, Africa, and Eurasia from the death of Muhammad to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Content extends from the emergence of Islam to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. After a survey of late antiquity, Unit One of the semester, “The Shattering of Mediterranean Unity?” (632-1031), concentrates on the rise of Islam and the development of three distinct civilizations in the Mediterranean Basin: the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Caliphates. Unit Two, “Recovery and Revival” (1031-1227), examines the struggle between church and state, crusading and holy violence, the rise of towns and states, and trends in late medieval religion. Particular attention is given to women, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. Unit Three (1215-1453) explores the close of the Middle Ages as signaled by the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s.

The historical link between wealth, food and health is a highly complex one. In this respect one of the most influential historical narratives has been developed for the late medieval period. In the 14th century, demographic decline would have resulted in “Das Goldene Zeitalter des Handwerks”: labour had become scarce, and nominal wages rose while prices remained stable or decreased. As a consequence, diet and nutrition intake would have improved for large parts of the population, peasants as well as urban wage-earners. Instead of the monotonous grain-based diet of the 12th and 13th centuries, food became more varied. Especially meat and fish, sources of proteins and iron, became affordable for larger parts of the population - Europe was more than ever turning into “l’Europe carnivore” eating up to 100 kilograms of meat per capita a year in the 15th century according to Wilhelm Abel . In recent years both the regional variation of this diet improvement and its presumed positive impact on health and mortality have been questioned in the historiography. The link between diet improvement, disease and mortality in the wake of the Black Death turns out to be an uncertain one, with important regional variations, and biased by epidemiologic, environmental and social conditions . As to the supposed increase in meat consumption, Massimo Montanari advocated a more nuanced approach, indicating important regional and chronological divergences within late medieval Europe, as well as the lack of evidence for increased overall meat consumption on the late medieval countryside: in many rural regions beef-eating remained uncommon and both the extension of animal husbandry and the booming international oxen trade were more than ever oriented towards the urban markets . In this paper we will take up Montanari’s remarks for one of the core regions of “L’Europe carnivore”: the county of Flanders. For the towns of the densely populated and urbanized Southern Low Countries, a significant increase in meat consumption from the late medieval period on has already been noticed by Herman Van Der Wee in 1966 . However the main problems remain unsolved: did late medieval diet indeed improve for large numbers of the both the urban and rural populations? We can further question whether such ‘improvement’ consisted solely of an increase in the quantities of meat consumed or conversely, whether more qualitative changes were also visible. Finally, it remains an open question whether the improved nutrition intake was sufficient to change health conditions and mortality on a more than individual base. In what follows we will concentrate on meat consumption, although the presumed nutritional changes of the late medieval period also concerned other foodstuffs like fish, cheese and butter. We will try to argue that an ‘overall’ increase in meat consumption in late medieval Flanders is highly problematic. Regional and social variations in food consumption were often more significant than ‘general’ chronological evolutions. As we will see, this wide variety of diets can only be explained by linking food consumption to regional economic and environmental conditions . In our Flemish test-case this will be illustrated by comparing the inland part of the region, where a more traditional small-size family survival economy had developed and where animal husbandry was focused on manure and dairy production, and not on private meat consumption, with the coastal area, where extensive and commercial cattle-breeding developed from the late medieval period on.

This is the abstract of a paper that was presented at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 7-9, 2019, as part of the session: Plague as a Pan-Eurasian Phenomenon: Same Disease, Differing Mortalities.

Keywords: Black Death; Yersinia pestis; Mongol Empire; historical epidemiology; paleogenetics; phylogenetics.

A much-revised version of the paper was published as: Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains.” Both can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17613/7020-8j08. Feel free to contact me directly: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This paper traces the fortunes of the Rampolye family as detailed in the fourteenth-century manorial court rolls of Walsham le Willows, Suffolk between 1349 and 1400.  Familial relationships are identified (augmented by the 1381 Poll Tax Return) and the socio-economic impact of the Black Death is discussed.

George Huppert’s After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary analysis of European society from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. The text examines peasants, nobles, and clergy in rural areas, villages, and cities across Europe. Dedicating his book to Fernand Braudel, Huppert immediately expresses his adherence to the Annales school’s method of historical interpretation. Following Braudel’s use of geography, sociology, economics, social anthropology, and other interdisciplinary fields, Huppert constructs a picture of European life by describing a few representative individuals, villages, and cities. He juxtaposes the source information available from the case studies in an attempt to find similarities, differences, and generalizations. Huppert’s analysis of rural and urban life, including topics ranging from armed rebellion to marriage practices, provides historians with a detailed view of daily life and an insight into aspects of Renaissance history typically overlooked in traditional political narratives. Thus, After the Black Death provides a worthwhile resource for those interested in a social history of the Renaissance that combines a wide range of sources that go beyond well-known popes, kings, inventors, painters, and philosophers.

This book brings together a collection of chapters reflecting the scholarship of Tom Beaumont James, Emeritus Professor at the University of Winchester, in advancing the study of medieval and early modern artefacts, buildings, gardens, and towns. The seventeen essays represent substantive contributions on specific topics and many of the authors started out as Tom’s students. Some focus on buildings, others on people, some on documentary evidence and some on material culture. The chapters range chronologically from early medieval Southampton through sixteenth-century Winchester to an analysis of that city’s nineteenth-century censuses. Although the work coheres around central Southern England there are also papers on Edward I’s Tower of London, the medieval and early modern gardens of two Oxford colleges, and the English occupation of Normandy in the fifteenth century.

This paper was presented at the 2016 Arizona Council for History Education Conference (ACHE). The conference theme this year was "Community, Connections, and Perspectives in History": "Good history teachers know that making connections among historical events, modern events, and students' lives is the key to engaging students in history. Conference participants will explore connections between communities and also how local perspectives can be used to make broader national and global connections to historical events. Sessions will include U.S., world, and Arizona history; innovative ways to teach and share history; and address the Arizona literacy standards for history/social studies."

This paper draws on my on-going work, both in teaching and in research, to craft new, more encompassing narratives about the largest pandemic in human history, the Black Death. The argument I am presenting here is that, since we have plague in our natural environment here in Arizona, we can use that as the "hook" to get students involved in the historical question: how did it get here? The answer (to collapse it a bit) is that it took a steam ship from China. And the strain of plague that was found in China at the end of the 19th century can now be shown to be directly related to the strain that caused the Black Death in the 14th century.

The science that allows us to tell these stories can get pretty complicated, but there are ways to break it down into nuggets the students can grasp. Further details about my syllabi and teaching methods can be found here on Academia.edu under the "Global Health - Teaching Documents" section of my page. Also, this blog post describes my most recent experience of teaching my Black Death course: https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/blog/2015/08/27/teaching-the-new-paradigm-in-black-death-studies/.

Based on discussion at the conference, what I've posted here now are: (a) the slides I presented at the ACHE meeting; and (b) a Bibliography that lists not only the sources for the slides, but also some additional bibliography that may prove helpful in developing lesson plans for teaching at the K-12 level. There is a lot of material that is now available open-access, so we have more opportunities than ever before to let students see in concrete ways how a global approach to history really works.

Pogrome sind keine Naturkatastrophen die nach Gesetzmässigkeiten auftreten müssen. Sie sind von Menschen gemacht und können von Menschen verhindert werden. In dieser Arbeit soll das judenfeindliche Pogrom von 1349 in Zürich untersucht werden. Wer waren die Akteure? Und welche Handlungsmöglichkeiten gab es für diese Akteure? Welche Rolle spielte die städtische Obrigkeit beim Pogrom? Oder war es der „Pöbel“ der das Pogrom erzwang? Wie ist die Position von König Karl IV. zu bewerten? Handelte es sich beim Pogrom um eine Zäsur für das jüdische Leben in Zürich?

La Biblioteca Nacional de España conserva un ejemplar de un pliego suelto poético (testimonio único) que relata los horrores vividos por la población de Logroño desde el 19 de mayo al 25 de julio de 1599. Una epidemia de peste, procedente de Francia, se difundió rápidamente por el reino de Castilla y llegó a Logroño, causando la muerte de 4.000 personas según el relacionero. Este pliego noticiero es un documento de extraordinario interés por los detalles que se dan sobre los problemas que sufre la población por la carestía de alimentos y el horror de ver cómo en pocas horas personas sanas se convierten en cadáveres. El pueblo, aterrado, especula sobre la causa, asociándola a los astros o a disparatadas teorías. A pesar de que la relación se imprimió seguramente con pretensión de ensalzar la actuación del corregidor Francisco de Moscoso, se trasluce que las autoridades fueron las primeras en huir del lugar abandonando a la población. Es prodigiosa la riqueza de información en solo cuatro páginas en esta relación de un suceso que conmocionó a España a finales del siglo XVI.

The identification of deviant burials as those of ‘vampires’ is a feature of excavated skeletons from sites across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as well as the Balkans. Based on a close reading of historic and folkloric sources researchers have sought to match features of excavated sites with narrative descriptions drawn from vampire legend and myth. This study critically reviews the recent claims based on sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Whilst it is found that there was a widespread belief in vampires across Europe, it is argued that it is difficult to make absolute claims for ‘vampire’ burials on archaeological grounds as in most cases there are alternate and equally compelling interpretations of the data.

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, VAMPIRE, DEVIANT BURIAL, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH, FOLKLORE, PAGAN, BURIAL, WITCH, BALKANS, EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE, SOUTHERN EUROPE, BULGARIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, POLAND, GREECE, ITALY, SLOVAKIA, LESBOS, VENICE, APOTROPAIC, VAMPIRIDZHIJA, PERPERIKON, SOZOPOL, PROSTEJOV, CELAKOVICE, DRAWSKO, GLIWICI, SOUTHWELL, KILTEASHEEN, LAZZARETTO NUOVO, NACHTZEHRER, KAMIEN POMORSKI

Although venerated throughout the Christian West, St Roch has nevertheless remained a mysterious personage.  Beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century the cult of the holy pilgrim, protector against the plague, spread from Lombardy to Venice and from Venice German merchants took it to Nuremberg and southern Germany, from where it swiftly spread to the rest of Europe.  But who was in fact St Roch and what were the causes which led to his cult becoming so deeply rooted with such speed so that traces of it can be seen everywhere including representations of him in works of art ?
It was to answer these questions that Belgian, French, Italian and German scholars met at Padua in February 2004.  Their exchange of views led to the abandonment of opinions previously considered certainties.  The joint examination of hagiographic, literary, iconographic and documentary sources as well as the discovery of new texts all gave rise to the problematical image of a new saint who appeared in the wake of a new illness – the plague.  It was the result of a process of hagiographic elaboration but not as such a product of pure imagination.  It was the invention of printing which led to the rapid progression of the cult by the laity of this lay saint, both at its origins and in its elaboration.

Pandemics Throughout History and Their Effects on Society Life
Abstract
One of the important factors to be considered in the explanation and interpretation of history is pandemic diseases. The nature of the pandemic diseases, ways of prevention and treatments are not fully known for a long time.
People saw the disease as a wrath of God until they learned the nature of the epidemic, and often placed a blessing on it. Many diseases with an endemic, epidemic and pandemic character have been experienced since ancient times and millions of people have died in these outbreaks. Plague, malaria, cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid, typhus and syphilis are important epidemic diseases that cause mass death. However, all of these could not produce outbreaks while would affect several continents of the world. We can only say that plague, cholera and influenza diseases are pandemic epidemics and that affect people globally known. The world has experienced from antiquity to the present, more than ten influenza pandemics with three plagues, seven cholera, and the outbreak we are experiencing today. Epidemic
outbreaks of smallpox, malaria and yellow fever which caused the death of many people, were at least as effective as these three diseases.
The reason for the high destruction of all pandemics is that the disease is not fully recognized. Therefore, the mortality rates were high, and the spreading areas were wide. Epidemics/pandemics deeply affected social life economically, socially, psychologically, culturally, politically, religiously, geographically and many more.
Keywords: pandemic, plague, cholera, influenza/flu, pandemics in history, pandemic and society

This article investigates the origins, significance and varied inflections of the figure of an angel in Renaissance representations of St Roch. Although presumed to derive from the saint’s biography—specifically, to depict his cure from bubonic plague by an angel—the exact relationship between text and image is more complex than one of straightforward narrative illustration. Textual priority cannot be assumed, as representations of the new saint preceded by nearly two decades the earliest extant biographies. Moreover, these early vite make no mention of angelic involvement in Roch’s healing. Rocketing to success as efficacious plague protector in the late-fifteenth century, Roch has been recently unmasked as a pious fiction. By interrogating the multiple reworkings of the angel—shown blessing, announcing or actively curing with the tools of contemporary medicine—the essay elucidates the processes of saint formation and the key role of visual imagery in shaping worshippers’ conception of the saint and the operation of his protective powers.

The essay argues for the origins of the theme in Venetian art, and identifies Andrea da Murano's St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece (c. 1477-79; Accademia, Venice) as perhaps the earliest extant version. Other works discussed include Bartolomeo Vivarini's triptych for S. Eufemia (1480), a watercolour probably by notary, lawyer and print collector Jacopo Rubieri, and altarpieces by Titian and Pordenone. Analysis of the extant lives of the saint suggests that the origins of the theme of Roch and the angel are likely visual rather than textual. Subsequent sections investigate modifications to the theme in Northern Renaissance art, where identification of the angel as Raphael, the “angelic doctor,” encouraged artists to represent him not simply blessing or pointing to the bubo, but actively ministering to the diseased saint, applying a healing salve or even taking up the surgical instruments of his earthly counterparts to lance Roch’s bubo. The final section of the essay highlights the continuing mutability of depictions of saint and angel in sixteenth century Italian art, where the grounded heavenly attendant is replaced by the angel aloft. Works analyzed include paintings by Lombard artists such as Vicenzo Civerchio and Titian's print of c. 1517 for the Scuola di San Rocco.

This report will explore the concept of Feudalism in fourteenth century Medieval England, and the events that occurred after the Black Death devastated this era and society. It will entail the changes to the social structure due to the high mortality of the Black Death by using a range of sources and visual representations. Prior to reading this report one must understand the hardship of living in such an era of Medieval England in the fourteenth century, and take this into consideration, as this report is designed for readers who have basic knowledge to the tragedy of the Black Death.

This essay appears as the Preface to: *Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death*, ed. Monica H. Green (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, UK: Arc-Medieval Press, 2015), pp. ix-xx. This is the HARDBOUND edition of essays that first appeared in 2014 in the journal, *The Medieval Globe*. This preface (as well an accompanying index) are new in the book version, which can be purchased from Arc-Medieval Press (ISBN 978-1-942401-00-1).

The *Medieval Globe* volume went to press in Spring of 2014, before the full import of the 2013-2015 West African Ebola outbreak had become clear. By the Fall of 2014, comparisons were being made between what was still an exponentially growing outbreak in West Africa and the greatest pandemic of human history, the Black Death. Many of those comparisons were specious, but they pointed to the real terror that both diseases created, not simply by the swiftness of the mortality they caused, but by the social disruptions they produced. The present essay was an attempt to bring some greater historical analysis to the question of how we think comparatively across time periods and contexts. I welcome further discussion of these questions.

Despite few overt references to the Black Death (1348-49) or later pandemic waves (1361-62, 1369, 1379-83, 1389-93), the Canterbury Tales (c.1387-1400) offer a compelling psychogram of a diverse community processing massive demographic shifts and lasting intergenerational traumas in the wake of a cataclysmic pandemic. Building on Boccaccio’s account of a group of noblemen escaping plague-stricken Florence for a bucolic retreat, Chaucer imagines a motley crew of itinerant first and second generation survivors who journey towards the shrine of Thomas Becket - the saint “who helped them when they were sick” (General Prologue 18) - while engaging in a storytelling contest, whose uncertain outcome (the work was left unfinished) locks the pilgrims in a state of compulsive narration mimicking their intergenerational trauma.

Echoes of the Black Death reverberate throughout the Tales, most noticeably in the Pardoner’s Tale, whose chronotope and story arc allegorize the plague’s lethality and swift transmission. Pandemic archetypes populate the General Prologue in the shape of bogeymen (Cook), fallen socialites (Knight, Prioress), rivalling opportunists (Miller, Reeve), wealthy inheritors (Wife of Bath), corrupt clergy (Pardoner), and utopian visionaries (Franklin). Post-pandemic social change is reflected in volatile social and linguistic codes (notably skewed forms of address), while socio-economic grievances (aired by the ‘churls’) are delivered through maladaptive child modes reminiscent of trauma literature.

Significantly, such egocentric coping mechanisms are regularly countered by visions of collaborative inclusivity (the Host’s), mutual altruism (the Franklin’s) and genuine piety (the Parson’s). Several narrators display a sense of existential dread linked to traumatic experiences (the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale), and their mediated narrations arguably serve as Chaucer the pilgrim’s conduit for processing diffuse affective intergenerational memories. There are thus many ways in which the Canterbury Tales explore the remembering, narrativizing and processing of intergenerational trauma at multiple levels.

This was an invited presentation presented at the GlobAfrica Workshop, “Did the Plague Impact Sub-Saharan Africa Before 1899? A GlobAfrica Workshop,” held at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, April 22-23, 2016, and sponsored by Gérard Chouin, Associate Professor of History.

There are three attachments, all downloadable: 1) the poster for the event; 2) my individual abstract; and 3) the collected program and abstracts of all presentations.

A much-revised version of this was published in 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal, *Afriques*, https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125. Feel free to contact via e-mail should you wish to have any further information: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

İnsanlık, ilkel yaşamdan bugünkü uygarlığa erişim sürecinde yalnız gözle görebildiği varlık ve maddi dünya ile değil, aynı zamanda gözle göremediği; yüzyıllarca insana saldıran, tehdit eden, öldüren bir dünya ile de mücadele etmiştir. Bugün iyi bilinen bu mikrobik dünyayı uzun süre görememiş, anlayamamış; fakat onun marifetlerini gözlemiş, duymuş ve yaşamıştır. İnsanlar her ne kadar kaza, savaş ve yaşlılık gibi aracılarla ölüm olgusunu tanıyıp kabullenmiş olsalar da ölümün birer ikişer değil de yüzer, biner gerçekleştiği anlarda bu durumu anlamlandırmakta bile zorlanmışlardır 1 . Salgın hastalık kaynaklı bu ani ve yoğun ölümlerin sebepleri, erken dönemlerden itibaren çok uzun süre sadece ilahi ve kutsi ifadelerle açıklanmaya çalışılmış ve insanın kendi günah ve kabahatlerine karşı ilahi güçlerin insanlara verdiği bir ceza olarak algılanmıştır 2 .

This is the abstract for Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631, DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaa511, plus Supplemental Material, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains,” which was published online.

The full PDF of the article along with the marmot supplement can be accessed at my Humanities Commons page, with this DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17613/7020-8j08.

Questions: feel free to write me: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

Our study was twofold, to provide bioarchaeological evidence for population diversity in Medieval London, as this topic relies on primary sources, and to investigate whether social inequalities based on ancestry resulted in health disparities.  We collected palaeopathological data, and applied macromorphoscopics to establish the ancestry of 41 individuals from a Black Death cemetery, and united these data with extant light stable isotope and aDNA data for childhood residency and population origin.  The forensic technique identified seven different population affiliations, and identified individuals of Black African ancestry and dual heritage (White-European and Black African).  The scientific analyses found that one of the individuals with dual heritage was likely to have maternal ancestry from the British Isles, and one male with Black African ancestry was at least a second generation migrant.  The study failed to identify any health disparities or differences in funerary treatment.

The historical link between wealth, food and health is a highly complex one. In this respect one of the most influential historical narratives has been developed for the late medieval period. In the 14th century, demographic decline would have resulted in “Das Goldene Zeitalter des Handwerks”: labour had become scarce, and nominal wages rose while prices remained stable or decreased. As a consequence, diet and nutrition intake would have improved for large parts of the population, peasants as well as urban wage-earners. Instead of the monotonous grain-based diet of the 12th and 13th centuries, food became more varied. Especially meat and fish, sources of proteins and iron, became affordable for larger parts of the population - Europe was more than ever turning into “l’Europe carnivore” eating up to 100 kilograms of meat per capita a year in the 15th century according to Wilhelm Abel  . In recent years both the regional variation of this diet improvement and its presumed positive impact on health and mortality have been questioned in the historiography. The link between diet improvement, disease and mortality in the wake of the Black Death turns out to be an uncertain one, with important regional variations, and biased by epidemiologic, environmental and social conditions . As to the supposed increase in meat consumption, Massimo Montanari advocated a more nuanced approach, indicating important regional and chronological divergences within late medieval Europe, as well as the lack of evidence for increased overall meat consumption on the late medieval countryside: in many rural regions beef-eating remained uncommon and both the extension of animal husbandry and the booming international oxen trade were more than ever oriented towards the urban markets .
In this paper we will take up Montanari’s remarks for one of the core regions of “L’Europe carnivore”: the county of Flanders. For the towns of the densely populated and urbanized Southern Low Countries, a significant increase in meat consumption from the late medieval period on has already been noticed by Herman Van Der Wee in 1966 . However the main problems remain unsolved: did late medieval diet indeed improve for large numbers of the both the urban and rural populations? We can further question whether such ‘improvement’ consisted solely of an increase in the quantities of meat consumed or conversely, whether more qualitative changes were also visible. Finally, it remains an open question whether the improved nutrition intake was sufficient to change health conditions and mortality on a more than individual base. In what follows we will concentrate on meat consumption, although the presumed nutritional changes of the late medieval period also concerned other foodstuffs like fish, cheese and butter. We will try to argue that an ‘overall’ increase in meat consumption in late medieval Flanders is highly problematic. Regional and social variations in food consumption were often more significant than ‘general’ chronological evolutions. As we will see, this wide variety of diets can only be explained by linking food consumption to regional economic and environmental conditions . In our Flemish test-case this will be illustrated by comparing the inland part of the region, where a more traditional small-size family survival economy had developed and where animal husbandry was focused on manure and dairy production, and not on private meat consumption, with the coastal area, where extensive and commercial cattle-breeding developed from the late medieval period on.

This paper examines historical concentrations of certain animals between the fifth and the fourteenth centuries, subdivided into time periods. Differences and similarities found in the archaeozoological material contribute to debates concerning the collapse of the Roman world and the establishment of new medieval structures.

In two articles in English I have used the material from the book Digerdöden (Black Death) published in 2003 – which is the standard work on Late Medieval plagues in Sweden.  In this article I give an overview of epidemics in Sweden during the 14th and 15th century. It was in research on plagues I fully developed the Source Pluralistic method. The title alludes to an older notion that the plague did not hit Sweden.

En el contexto de la Corte real de Barcelona, se traduce al catalán el texto de la célebre danza macabra pintada en el cementerio de los Inocentes de París. El autor anónimo parece que lo habría terminado antes de 1480, y llama "dança o ball de la Mort" a lo que en francés se llamaba "Danse Macabre", lo que hace difícil pensar en un origen ibérico de la palabra "macabro", como algunos habían propuesto (Massip-Kovács 2004: 31). Es sabido que el texto incluido en el fresco original fue destruido en 1785, aunque conservamos fiel traza gracias a la edición con grabados de Guyot Marchant (1485), donde aparecen los muertos desollados -muchos con el abdomen abierto y eviscerado, pero otros no, llevando dardos, guadañas, palas y algún ataúd. Ahora bien, el anónimo traductor no sigue en la traducción el orden estricto de los danzantes de Marchant, y en cambio se ajusta a la sucesión de personajes que presenta el Ms. fr. 14989 de la BnF. Se trata de un códice que al parecer perteneció al Duque de Borgoña Felipe el Bueno (1396-1467), quien en 1449 hizo representar en su palacio de Brujas un Jeu de la Danse macabre 1 . Nos preguntamos si una copia de este manuscrito borgoñón no habría llegado a la corte catalanoaragonesa desde que Alfonso el Magnánimo fuera el primer monarca en pertenecer a la Orden del Toisón de Oro fundada en 1430 por el mencionado Felipe 2 . Desde 1445, pues, los reyes de Aragón perte-1 I. Hans-Collas, Du texte à l'image: danses macabres peintes en France au XVe et au XVIe siècle, in Balla con la morte: cultura ed estetica del macabro dal medioevo ad oggi (Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Università di Trieste, 25-27 maggio 2007. Esta aportación no apareció en la edición de las actas que se publicaron en Prospero. Rivista di Letterature straniere, Comparatistica e Studi Culturali, vol. XV (2009 [2010]): 7-158 [Parte I: Atti del Convegno "Balla con la Morte: Cultura ed estetica del Macabro dal Medioevo ad oggi" (Università di Trieste 2007) a cura di R. Gefter WondriCH -L. ramello]. 2 F. massip, El Toisón de Oro en escena: espectáculo e imagen al servicio de la casa de Borgoña, in E. mira -A. delva eds., A la búsqueda del Toisón de Oro. La Europa de los Príncipes. La Europa de las Ciudades, Valencia, Generalitat Valenciana 2007, pp. 213-223, 431-434 i 567-576.

This essay investigates reactions to the recurring disaster of bubonic plague by analysing a series of miniatures in the chronicle of Lucchese apothecary Giovanni Sercambi. Completed in 1400, the richly illustrated manuscript (Lucca, Archivio di Stato, ms. 107) records seven epidemics, from the Black Death to the century’s end. Demons or angels are shown unleashing the disease on helpless humanity. Amongst the earliest visual evocations of the experience of plague, the drawings offer key insights into early modern responses to this most fearsome of disasters, articulating contemporary understandings of plague’s supernatural causes and terrestrial effects, and the emotional regimes elicited in response. Examined individually and as unfolding sequence, set against and interacting with the surrounding text, the miniatures fulfil a range of commemorative, hortatory and cathartic functions.