The Black Death

The argument about the nature and origins of bubonic plague continues. There have been revisionary books by J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1970) and Graham Twigg, The Black Death: a biological reappraisal (London, 1984). And almost everybody now agrees that plague was not the only – nor even (on many occasions) the major – killer in the late-medieval and early-modern West. Robert S. Gottfried reviewed other infections but still gave pride-of-place to plague in his Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, The medical response and the demographic consequences (Leicester, 1978), then following that work with a general book on The Black Death. Natural and human disaster in medieval Europe (London, 1983). But smallpox, influenza and typhus earn a more prominent place in Ann G. Carmichael’s Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 1986), as they do again, with particular emphasis on malaria, in Mary J. Dobson’s Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). For that later period, see also Paul Slack’s The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), and the collected essays in The Plague Reconsidered. A new look at its origins and effects in 16^th and 17^th century England, ed. Paul Slack (Local Population Studies supplement, 1977), and in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1979). Other collections of essays include The Black Death. The impact of the fourteenth-century plague, ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), and Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, eds. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham N. C., 1989). And contemporary descriptions of the plague, many in translation for the first time, have recently been collected by Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, 1994), in a useful volume of sources.