The Black Death

The sufferings of local populations and how they lived with pestilence are studied by Richard Gyug, ‘The effects and extent of the Black Death of 1348: new evidence for clerical mortality in Barcelona’, Medieval Studies, 45 (1983), pp. 385–98, Richard Lomas, ‘The Black Death in County Durham’, Journal of Medieval History, 15 (1989), pp. 127–40, R. A. Davies, ‘The effect of the Black Death on the parish priests of the medieval diocese of Coventry and Lichfield’, Historical Research, 62 (1989), pp. 85–90, Ray Lock, ‘The Black Death in Walsham-le-Willows’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 37 (1992), pp. 316–37, Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Accommodating plague in medieval Marseille’, Continuity and Change, 11 (1996), pp. 11–41, and William J. Dohar, The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership. The diocese of Hereford in the fourteenth century (Philadelphia, 1995). As for the medical profession, its first response to the plague is the subject of John Henderson’s ‘Epidemics in Renaissance Florence: medical theory and government response’ in Maladies etsociété (xii^e–xvii^e siècles), eds. N. Bulst and R. Delort (Paris, 1989), pp. 165–86, and of the same author’s ‘The Black Death in Florence: medical and communal responses’, in Death in Towns. Urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 136–50. John Henderson’s major book on Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994) includes a chapter on ‘Charity, the Poor, and the Aftermath of the Black Death, 1348–1400’ (pp. 297–353). For other Tuscan studies, see David Herlihy’s ‘Deaths, marriages, births, and the Tuscan economy (c.1300–1550)’, in Population Patterns in the Past, ed. Ronald Demos Lee (New York, 1977), pp. 135–64, and the two books by Samuel K. Cohn on Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800. Strategies for the afterlife (Baltimore, 1988) and on The Cultof Remembrance and the Black Death. Six Renaissance cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992).

Large claims are now being made for the Black Death’s primacy in world affairs, as in William H. McNeill’s Plagues and People (Oxford, 1977) and William M. Bowsky’s valuable compendium, The Black Death. A turning point in history? (New York, 1971). Richard C. Palmer makes a similar claim for English Lawin the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), whereas Mark Ormrod in ‘The English government and the Black Death of 1349–79’, in Englandin the Fourteenth Century, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), pp.175–88, is keener to stress how little changed. That older view of institutional continuity still has much to recommend it. And a useful counter to Palmer’s book is Edward Powell’s more temperate Kingship, Law, and Society. Criminal justice in the reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989). However, in social history generally, Samuel K. Cohn’s recent edition of the late David Herlihy’s unpublished essays on The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge Mass., 1997) is a good demonstration of how far Black Death studies have moved on. For even Herlihy, the doyen of late-medieval urban demography, had become convinced that there was insufficient evidence of a population down-turn before the Black Death to justify the belief of many historians of his own generation – influencing Philip Zieger among others – that plague was less the cause than an accelerator of social change.