Towards an Alternative Black Death Narrative for Ireland: Ecological and Socio-Economic Divides on the Medieval European Frontier

The consequences of the Black Death for the ownership of land: The Jamtland case To what extent did private landed property in Norway go to the Crown after the Black Death (1349–50) and subsequent epidemics when no one wanted to take up ownership and consequent duties because of the dramatic decline inpopulation? This question, which has not been investigated in earlier research, is studied here with Jamtland as a case in point. In Jamtland it was quite common for farms to be deserted after the Black Death, ownerless even, and to come into the possession of the Crown, especially in the case of smaller, less attractive, landed properties in marginal areas. On the one hand, the Jamtland case demonstrates the consequences of depopulation after the Black Death, and, on the other, the far-reaching regal rights that could be claimed in Norway in the 14th century. Later, however, when the farmers began showing renewed interest in taking over the deserted farms, representatives of the Crown returned the ownership to individuals through a great number of gifts.

Cohn and Scott and Duncan advocate alternative theories to the effect that historical plague was a viral disease and maintain, in accordance with this view, that survival of plague infection provided persistent and strong immunity. If the observation or assertion were correct that survivors of historical plague disease acquired strong and persistent immunity, it would constitute substantial evidence that historical plague epidemics could not have been bubonic plague or indeed any other bacterial disease, and probably was a viral disease instead. Since this type of assertion tend to falsify the bubonic plague theory and to justify the search for a tenable alternative, this subject of immunity must also be examined sufficiently thoroughly to decide the matter. Epidemiological theory militates against the notion that the Black Death and subsequent plague epidemics could have been a viral disease but is compatible with a bacterial disease.Keywords: bacterial disease; Black Death; historical plague; immunity; viral disease

Plague, one of the most devastating diseases of human history, is caused by Yersinia pestis. In this study, we analyzed the population genetic structure of Y. pestis and the two other pathogenic Yersinia species, Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. enterocolitica. Fragments of five housekeeping genes and a gene involved in the synthesis of lipopolysaccharide were sequenced from 36 strains representing the global diversity of Y. pestis and from 12-13 strains from each of the other species. No sequence diversity was found in any Y. pestis gene, and these alleles were identical or nearly identical to alleles from Y. pseudotuberculosis. Thus, Y. pestis is a clone that evolved from Y. pseudotuberculosis 1,500-20,000 years ago, shortly before the first known pandemics of human plague. Three biovars (Antiqua, Medievalis, and Orientalis) have been distinguished by microbiologists within the Y. pestis clone. These biovars form distinct branches of a phylogenetic tree based on restriction fragment length polymorphisms of the locations of the IS100 insertion element. These data are consistent with previous inferences that Antiqua caused a plague pandemic in the sixth century, Medievalis caused the Black Death and subsequent epidemics during the second pandemic wave, and Orientalis caused the current plague pandemic.

This article critiques the debate over the extent to which labor shortages caused by the Black Death and subsequent epidemics empowered women economically, and whether this had significant implications for overall demographic behavior and long-term economic performance. Some historians have argued that after ca. 1350 women in the North Sea region were drawn into the land and labor markets to a far greater extent than women in other parts of Europe, and in particular into employment as single live-in servants, which led to a rise in the average age of women at first marriage and the proportion of women never marrying. This in turn led to the formation of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which is associated with fertility restriction and higher levels of household income. The evidence and arguments underpinning this viewpoint are critically evaluated for England, where by 1600 the EMP was certainly established. The extant sources do not enable us to measure the extent of women's financial gains after the Black Death, or to assess changes in their marital choices. There is no convincing evidence for any rise in the proportion of single female servants in the century after the Black Death or for the existence of the EMP before 1550. Young women did not increase their participation in the land market in order to construct a marriage fund. The article concludes by assessing the possible chronologies of England's transition to the EMP, and by suggesting new lines of enquiry about structural changes in women's work during the sixteenth century.

For the whole of the 20th century it was believed that the Black Death and all the plagues of Europe (1347–1670) were epidemics of bubonic plague. This review presents evidence...

Parasites rely on resources from a host and are selected to achieve an optimal combination of transmission and virulence. Human-induced changes in parasite ecology, such as intensive farming of hosts, might not only favour increased parasite abundances, but also alter the selection acting on parasites and lead to life-history evolution. The trade-off between transmission and virulence could be affected by intensive farming practices such as high host density and the use of antiparasitic drugs, which might lead to increased virulence in some host-parasite systems. To test this, we therefore infected Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) smolts with salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) sampled either from wild or farmed hosts in a laboratory experiment. We compared growth and skin damage (i.e. proxies for virulence) of hosts infected with either wild or farmed lice and found that, compared to lice sampled from wild hosts in unfarmed areas, those originating from farmed fish were more harmful; they inflicted more skin damage to their hosts and reduced relative host weight gain to a greater extent. We advocate that more evolutionary studies should be carried out using farmed animals as study species, given the current increase in intensive food production practices that might be compared to a global experiment in parasite evolution.

Bubonic plague has a distinctive seasonal pattern. The central argument of this chapter has three main parts: (1) this seasonal pattern can only be explained by the epidemiological properties of rat-flea-borne bubonic plague; (2) this seasonal pattern is incompatible with diseases spread by cross-infection; and (3) none of the alternative theories can explain this pattern. The arrival of the Black Death and subsequent plague epidemics caused a dramatic transformation of the seasonal distribution of mortality in England throughout the Late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period. Twigg was the first of the advocates of alternative theories to emphasize the importance of the material on institutions of new parish priests during the Black Death for the study of the seasonality of plague.Keywords: Bubonic Plague; parish priests; plague mortality; Twigg

Local institutions and pandemics: City autonomy and the Black Death

The importance of societal factors in shaping forest area, structure and composition through economic activity, policy, governance, and population changes is frequently acknowledged in ecologic studies, however the specific socioeconomic factors that lead to land use change through time are rarely articulated. We present a consilience-driven approach for integrating socioeconomic and paleoecologic data to explore land use legacies and interpret causes of past abrupt environmental change. We combine paleoecologic history reconstructed from pollen analysis of lake sediments and contemporary historical narratives of socioeconomic change developed from archival sources illustrated by three case studies from two sites in the Italian Apennines. We found that in the Rieti Basin, central Italy, between 850 and 900 AD (coeval with the beginning of the Medieval Climate Anomaly—MCA), under the new Carolingian rule, the imperially sponsored monastery at Farfa consolidated small landholdings, leading to more active land management and significant forest loss for agricultural activities. In contrast, at Pollino in southern Italy between 1050 and 1100 AD, also during the MCA, Norman conquest helped to convert a deforested landscape into an actively managed fir forest for timber needed for construction. At both sites, depopulation and land management between 1350 and 1400 AD caused by the Black Death, led to forest rewilding, however each site took a different trajectory. The studies presented offer examples of how the integration of detailed historical narratives with high-resolution paleoecologic reconstructions can provide a more nuanced examination of the interrelationship between societal factors and climate forcing in shaping land-use legacies and has the capacity to illuminate the link between specific human pressures and pathways of ecological change over many centuries.

Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600. Edited by Steven BassettThe Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Edited by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinnThe Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Memory of Denis L. T. Bethel. Edited by Marc A. MeyerChurch and City, 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke. Edited by David Abulafia, Michael Franklin and Miri RubinAnglo‐Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate. By Stephanie HollisStudies on the History of Medieval Sicily and South Italy. By Evelyn M. JamisonA History of Anglo‐Latin Literature 1066–1422. By A. G. RiggKnightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade‐The Limousin and Gascony c.970–c.1130. By Marcus BullLiving and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience. By Barbara HarveyThe New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple. By Malcolm BarberEngland in the Thirteenth Century. By Alan HardingThe Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. By Samuel K. CohnDeath and Ritual in Renaissance Florence. By Sharon T. StrocchiaColor and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. By Marcia HallThe Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland. By R. James GoldsteinWalter Bower, Scotichronicon, Volume I. Edited by John and Winifred MacQueen. General Editor D. E. R. Watt

Reviewed by: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Sam Zeno Conedera David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press 2011) xxxi + 813 pp., ill. David Abulafia’s latest book has earned every one of the laudatory quotes on the dust jacket. The Great Sea is narrative history on steroids, a magnum opus that is sure to influence the way that scholars think about Mediterranean history for many years to come. The Great Sea is, as its subtitle indicates, a human history of the Mediterranean, meaning that it covers the entire period of human inhabitation. The book is meant to be a history of the sea rather than of the lands around it, of the people who crossed the sea and lived close by its shores in ports and on islands (xvii). Even with this limitation, Abulafia has a vast chronological and geographical span to cover. He breaks it down into five distinctive periods: First Mediterranean, 22000 bc–1000 bc; Second Mediterranean, 1000 bc–ad 600; Third Mediterranean, 600–1350; Fourth Mediterranean, 1350–1830; Fifth Mediterranean, 1830–2010. The first begins with the earliest human settlements and ends with the great migrations and cataclysms of 1200–1000 bc. The second witnesses the unification of the Great Sea under successive maritime empires and ends with the fragmentation of Roman power and the arrival of Islam. The third begins with Muslim and Jewish domination of the southern shores, witnesses the rise of the Italian communes, and ends with the Black Death. The fourth experiences the emergence of new Christian powers, like the Catalans, who are ultimately eclipsed by the Ottoman juggernaut. The overall fortunes of the Mediterranean change in this period, as the Atlantic assumes a more important role in the world, and the Great Sea becomes dominated for the first time by powers of Northern Europe. The distinct features of the fifth Mediterranean, which is still in progress, include the historical discovery of the earliest Mediterranean worlds, a hardening of previously more fluid ethnic and cultural differences, and the threat of environmental disaster. What characteristics define these distinct Mediterraneans? Abulafia sees long and slow processes of integration at work in each period, which eventually fall apart. Thus there is a broadly cyclical rise and fall, if not of empires, then at least of large-scale Mediterranean systems. Scholars will surely challenge the effort to encompass all of Mediterranean history into a conceptual and chronological schema, along with some of Abulafia’s other claims and priorities. One of his major targets is Braudel’s view that all change is slow and that man is imprisoned in a destiny in which he has little hand. The Great Sea, by contrast, emphasizes change over time and human agency (xxvi). Abulafia does not shy away from historical controversy. Regarding the cataclysms around 1200 bc and the mysterious Sea Peoples, for example, he says that the eastern Mediterranean was being plagued by fluid and unstable alliances of pirates and mercenaries, who were able occasionally to form large enough navies and armies to pillage population centers, including Troy (52). Yet Abulafia remains within the bounds of the evidence and does not pretend to have clear answers when the matter is truly murky. He also has ideological targets. With respect to “orientalism” in the nineteenth century, Abulafia says that it was not the expression of Western cultural imperialism. The masters of the eastern Mediterranean actively sought contact with the West, and saw themselves as members of a community of monarchs that embraced both the Mediterranean and Europe (545). Both Abulafia’s methodology [End Page 151] as well as his particular claims will be the subject of debate in the coming years. One of the great challenges of writing such a book is choosing what to include and what to leave out. The Great Sea offers good balance. Each period receives roughly proportionate treatment; Abulafia does not, for example, reduce the second Mediterranean to the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. His erudition is on display throughout in his command of archaeological evidence, narrative sources, and secondary work in many languages. He is also blessed with the gift of storytelling, such...

Reviewed by: Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague Jon Arrizabalaga Vivian Nutton , ed. Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague. Supplement no. 27 to Medical History. London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, 2008. viii + 130 pp. Ill. $72.00, £35.00, €52.00 (ISBN-10: 0-85484-116-4, ISBN-13: 978-0-85484-116-5). This collective volume is focused on the endless debate about the disease identity of historical plagues, specifically that of the medieval Black Death and of subsequent epidemics that ravaged western Europe until well into the eighteenth century. Yet its aim is not so much uncovering this identity as clarifying the crucial questions that separate those who defend a common identity between historical pestilences and the bubonic plague (on the basis that their common pathogen is Yersinia pestis) from those who deny it. Pestilential Complexities includes six essays. Five are revised versions of papers presented at a 2006 conference on the matter held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London by two historians with a long and fruitful research dedication to medieval plague (Ann G. Carmichael and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.), one archaeologist of plague (Daniel Antoine), one biomedical expert on Yersinia and bubonic plague (Elisabeth Carniel), and one physiologist concerned about historical demography (Lars Walløe). The sixth essay is a brief comment by the historian Kay Peter Jankrift. An introduction by the organizer of the conference and the editor of the supplement, Vivian Nutton, provides the reader with a valuable, synthetic state of the art. The volume's contributors hold different views about the medical identity of the Black Death, and Nutton generically introduces them as "sceptics" or "believers"—as though the theory that this condition was caused by Yersinia pestis and spread primarily by rat fleas (p. 14) were a matter of faith. But the volume represents a useful interdisciplinary exercise, bringing together and discussing the evidence supplied by conceptualizations and methodologies from research areas as disparate as history, archaeology, biomedicine, and epidemiology. The volume's contents fuel the impression that the question of the medical identity of the Black Death cannot be tackled in unproblematic, reductionist terms. It might be useful to remember that the factors shaping the clinical and epidemiological peculiarities of infectious diseases in human populations are numerous, complex, and dynamic, since infectious conditions are the evolutionary expressions of parasitic interactions among living beings within specific natural and social environments subject to innumerable changes (climate, natural disasters, human action, and so on). For diseases like the bubonic plague—a primary bacterial infection of rodents, both wild and domestic, that is most often accidentally transferred to human beings through fleas that have fed on rodents' infected blood—the multiple combinations among all of these variable factors make it [End Page 778] hard not to be openly skeptical about the feasibility of retrospective diagnoses in modern medical terms. Because of the excessive expectations that historians of science and archaeologists have put on biomolecular technologies, Antoine's remarks about the reliability of molecular genetics methods, such as polymerase chain reaction in analyzing the DNA preserved within the bones and teeth of skeletal remains, and his assessment of some alleged results with regard to Yersinia pestis appear to me particularly revealing (pp. 110–13). The last sentence of Carniel's closing essay might summarize the major conclusion of the volume, namely, "Although we cannot prove anything one way or the other, it should be emphasized that it is not possible to reject the plague etiology of the Black Death simply because certain symptoms and epidemiological features do not match those found today" (p. 122). Right at the end of his introduction, Nutton claims that "the gap between sceptics and believers . . . is smaller than might be assumed at first reading," although he finds it "uncertain" that "a totally satisfactory solution can be reached" (p. 16). Not least, I may add as a skeptic on this thorny matter, because retrospectively diagnosing the historical pestilences in modern medical terms involves not only the above-mentioned biomedical difficulties, but also historiographical and epistemological ones beyond the specific question of whether the Black Death can be identified with bubonic plague. For...

Anthropogenic versus natural control on lacustrine sediment yield records from the French Massif Central

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

Reviewed by: Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London by Matthew L. Newsom Kerr Annmarie Adams (bio) Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London. By Matthew L. Newsom Kerr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. 370. Paperback €93.59 Matthew L. Newsom Kerr’s Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London explores the history of London’s fever and smallpox hospitals, built by the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) between 1870 and 1900. In seven chapters and seventeen illustrations, the United States-based historian investigates the debates surrounding infectious disease, locating London’s hospitals in a complex landscape of governance and social control. Newsom Kerr engages well-known and obscure printed sources, especially surrounding the series of health and social reform acts which punctuated nineteenth-century British politics. Examples are the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867 and the Infectious Disease Act of 1889. Newsom Kerr’s project is novel, illuminating for readers in the style of a Victorian detective [End Page 347] the “subtle and almost invisible coercions lurking at the back of hospital isolation” (p. 159). A distinction of the book is this focus on isolation. Newsom Kerr argues that isolation in the Victorian period was fundamentally different than quarantine, which we know from the Black Death as a system of banishment and social stigma. To Victorians, Newsom Kerr says, quarantine had been “more a political tactic than a medical one” (p. 31). A central argument of the book is that hospital isolation was an everyday way for citizens to encounter state medicine (p. 3), thus rendering them governable. Technology and Culture readers may be particularly interested in Newsom Kerr’s insistence on isolation itself as a technology and his contention that that the isolation hospital typology is a British invention. If the act of isolating patients was technological, then it follows that the late nineteenth-century fever hospital network could work like machinery. This analogy is best illustrated in chapter five, entitled “Machines of Security.” By the epidemic of 1884, Newsom Kerr says, the MAB system was working really efficiently. Londoners with smallpox were identified and evacuated from home by ambulance and steamers to floating hospitals and purpose-built encampments. The MAB ambulance system, Newsom Kerr tells readers almost as aside, was one of the first public services in London to be done by telephone (p. 203). In terms of medical history, smallpox gets more attention in the book than other infectious diseases that threatened London during time period, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and typhus. Perhaps the most dramatic section of Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London is chapter six, which explores the highly significant role of mapping in the epidemiology of smallpox. Especially gripping is Newsom Kerr’s attention to the role of physician William Henry Power, whose concentric maps showed that smallpox hospitals were complicit in spreading the disease through the atmosphere. Despite the emphasis on hospitals, this is not a book about hospital design. Still, the term architecture appears frequently in the book and even in a title chapter. Hospital buildings are described through the eyes of others and surprisingly, given the book’s focus on space, no hospital floor plans are included. Newsom Kerr makes no reference to the rich architectural history of British hospitals, including studies that have addressed contagion and isolation. “Still, there has been no sustained analysis of the place of hospitalization within the broader narratives of public health and urban history,” he says (p. 7). I think particularly of Jeremy Taylor’s excellent 1997 book on the incremental development of the pavilion plan, with its useful work on the ventilation debates. In Newsom Kerr’s book, architects play negligible roles in the design of the fever hospitals, as if they passively realized the intentions of the MAB. The change in design preference from open hospital wards to glass, cubicle-like spaces for infectious patients [End Page 348] post-1900 is a subject of the final chapter, with agency for the change granted to doctors such as A. G. R. Cameron and F. Foord Caiger. Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London will appeal to readers in a range of disciplines, including urban history, medical geography, history of medicine...