The Justinianic Plague Pandemic: Progress and Problems

Abstract

This volume is a collection of papers on the so-called Justinianic plague pandemic of 541-750. pandemic was constituted by a number of plague epidemics in this period, a distinction to which I will return in the concluding section of this essay. volume consists of twelve papers distributed over five sections: Introduction, The Near East, The Byzantine Empire, The Latin West, T'he Challenge of Epidemiology and Molecular Biology, which together constitute an exceptionally valuable volume on this important but much neglected historical topic. editor, L. K. Little, has performed an excellent job in selecting and arranging these papers. This success reflects also a new interest in the topic. authors present and process new data based on literary sources, archaeological findings and the new discipline of paleomicrobiology, which permits recovery of genetic material (DNA) from skeletal remains in plague graves for identification of the pathogen of the disease. papers cover an extraordinary range of subjects. In the Intro duction, J. N. Hays raises a number of central questions that are too often neglected, for instance, how societies have perceived epi demics, how they respond to epidemics, the relevance and usability of modern biomedical understanding, identification of epidemics, and how societal structures affect the spread of epidemics, and so