Ole J Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: the complete history, Woodbridge and Rochester, Boydell Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 433, illus., £30.00 (hardback 0-85115-943-5).

Abstract

At first sight the subtitle of this book may seem somewhat pretentious. The author hastens to explain that this is not the case: the book is not and cannot be a definitive history. It is complete in the sense that it seeks to sum up present knowledge of the Black Death, how and when it spread, the mortality and the consequences. It aims at presenting the “Stand der Forschung”. It is, however, not a very reliable guide. Even in the first part of the book, which considers the nature of the plague, this becomes apparent. Benedictow has always been a strong advocate of the conventional retrospective diagnosis, which identifies late medieval and early modern plague with modern bubonic plague, a primarily tropical disease spread by rats and fleas, a diagnosis which originated with Alexandre Yersin himself. And Benedictow's dissertation (Plague in the late medieval Nordic countries, Oslo, 1992) was exactly an attempt to explain how this tropical disease could actually spread in a sparsely inhabited (and rather cold) country such as late medieval Norway. At no point, however, is there any indication in Benedictow's new Complete history that this diagnosis has been called in question over the last thirty years and that many (if not most) specialists today consider the diagnosis untenable and refrain from trying to identify historical plague with any modern disease. It is, of course, quite legitimate to uphold the traditional diagnosis and to disagree with biologists and historians such as Graham Twigg (The Black Death: a biological reappraisal, London, 1984), Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan (Biology of plagues: evidence from historical populations, Cambridge, 2001), Samuel K Cohn Jr (The Black Death transformed: disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe, London, 2001) and other critics of the traditional diagnosis, but it is not—to put it charitably—an acceptable scholarly approach simply to pretend that they do not exist. They do not figure even in the bibliography. The reader is left wondering what else Benedictow may have ignored because it does not agree with his points of view. Further suspicions are raised when you turn to the chapters on Scandinavia. Janken Myrdal's thorough research on the plague in Sweden (Digerdoden, pestvagor och odelaggelse. Ett perspektiv pa senmedeltidens Sverige, Stockholm, 2003) may have been too recent for consideration by Benedictow, but he consistently disregards any modern Norwegian historian who disagrees with him. The book certainly contains a lot of information, some of it easily available elsewhere. The chapter on the Middle East is really not much more than a paraphrase of Michael Dols' The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1976). For Eastern Europe and France, Benedictow relies on Jean-Noel Biraben's great (but also dated) Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays europeens et mediterraneens (Paris, 1975). Among the sources for the British Isles are, besides Charles Creighton's A history of epidemics in Britain (Cambridge, 1891), J F D Shrewsbury, A history of bubonic plague in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1970), and Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (Harmondsworth, 1970), all dated as well. Benedictow assures the reader that all efforts have been done to consult original sources, yet Byzantium is covered by referring to Biraben's paraphrase of the Italian Matteo Villani's account, even though the chief contemporary Greek sources such as John Cantacuzenos and Nicephoros Gregoras are available in translation. In the final bibliography of almost twenty pages one misses several recent publications such as David Herlihy, The Black Death and the transformation of the west (Cambridge, MA, 1997), and Colin Platt, King Death: the Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval England (London, 1996). Oversights and omissions can hardly be avoided in a work of synthesis. Also, synthesis involves questions of priorities. What makes Benedictow's book incomplete, however, is that it is biased. So biased, in fact, that it can be used only with great caution.