The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History

Cool book -- highly informative, and well documented

The Black Death is a pivotal event in history and too little information about it is available. The original sources are scattered and often don't provide good quantitative data as to its spread and its mortality and require a good deal of analysis and comparisons to be used. Scholars have often focused on single countries/regions. The author undertook the monumental task to strive for completeness in his coverage. The main parts of the book is an analysis of the spread of the plague though Europe, examining region by region, and then an analysis of the mortality in those regions for which sufficient data was available (mainly Italy, Spain, parts of France, and England). The attempt to be as complete as possible makes of course this book a bit dry (understatement…) And yet if you persist and wade through the details, you'll encounter a fascinating exposure of how scholars evaluate old texts and sources, make their best educated guesses on how to correct for missing data and how to interpret them and how to adjudicate between contradictory data, and eventually end with amazing confirmations through comparisons with different regions and sources. The author is a historian, but he is not avoiding quantitative analysis in demographics, economy and yes, epidemiology.The discussion of the cause and mechanics of the epidemics is possibly the most lively part of the book: the author provides a comprehensive account of the "orthodox" model of the bubonic plague which he assumes being the cause of the Black Death. I had tried unsuccessfully to find this information before and I commend the author for his readiness in studying a medical topic and summarizing it for us.Some of the previous reviewers have taken issue with this part - there is a controversy (probably settled now with more recent DNA testing) as to the cause of the Black Death. Perhaps the author could have mentioned more explicitly that the issue was not settled then and acknowledge some of the less than perfect fits between the orthodox model of the bubonic plague and the historical records. Still, perhaps the author thought that addressing the controversy would have distracted the reader from his main goal. I notice that he later wrote a couple of books - unbelievably expensive- on this topic.Finally, I am not sure why some of the previous reviewers complain about lack of references: I count 19 pages of references, and very few text pages without (multiple) footnotes. Also, I am really perplexed about some reviewers complaining about the author not taking into account other causes of mortality. The author is very clear about his methodology: ascertain the (approximate) population in a certain region, as close as possible before the onset of the Black Death. And then as soon as possible after it. With often the two dates having a considerable spread. And the population estimates being extrapolations from number of households, taxes paid etc. We are extremely far from collecting data on the cause of death... Still, if in a reasonably long period before, the population is fairly stable, and a few years afterwards has plummeted to 50% or 40% of the previous number, it justified to attribute the difference mainly to the plague. The author is also very clear about including death due to the plague itself, or due to hunger and lack of help (e.g., children in households visited by the plague) and takes that explicitly into account into his analyses.All in all, this is a fundamental text on the subject, and well worth reading if one can leave alone the "whodunit" question of the cause of the plague.

Based on the polemic reviews h ere (and my own piqued interest), I finally had time to read Benedictow's work. While there is much that I liked, as some reviews have earlier mentioned, the book is not without its problems. The first (and greatest) is the lack of citation of sources. For an academic (Benedictow is a professor of history at the University of Oslo), I was both surprised and disappointed.However, I was impressed with two aspects of his methodology. The first was his clear and detailed explanation of the method of transmission of Y. pestis (from fleas that prefer rats to opportunistic feeding on humans) and, based on this, he establishment of a timeline by which the plague spreads (from time of initial arrival to the time of the first recorded deaths). Having established this, Benedictow goes on to trace the spread and the approximate arrival time of the disease across North African and Western Europe.The majority of the book is a "nation" (I use quotation marks here, because in many cases there was no nation state - as in the case of Italy, Switzerland and Germany) by nation examination of the inferred routes the plague took, and the timelines Benedictow establishes for its arrival and eventual departure (having infected the population, the fleas looking for fresh hosts of having burned itself out.)As previous reviewers have noted, the data tables used in the last quarter of the book (discussing mortality rates) is flawed, as the consideration of other causes of mortality are not even considered or addressed in his quantitative analysis - again, I expect more from a professional scholar. On the other hand, I was impressed with his analysis of the rate of exposure and infection in cities relative to the countryside. (His reasoning summarized thusly: cities have more rats than the countryside, therefore the time by which infected fleas begin to bit humans is longer, even after the disease reaches urban centers; likewise, the disease tends to remain in cities longer than in the countryside because there are a greater number of human hosts to feed on.)I therefore have strongly mixed thoughts about the book: the epidemiological models and the explanation of the spread of the disease (and the estimated rate of its spread) was excellent; however, the lack of citation of sources and the quantitative generalizations are a serious flaw. For the general reader, I recommend John Kelly's _The Great Mortality_.

Would recommend to any scholar or student this is a fantastic academic piece that covers both reactions to the black death and statistics alike.

L'autore segue un approccio basato sulla ricerca e l'analisi di dati statistici seguendo una tecnica consolidata nella storiografia medievale moderna, ossia una certa diffidenza verso le fonti letterarie e un'attento studio dei documenti amministrativi ed ecclesiastici dotati di effettiva valenza storica. Se vi interessa uno studio dell'impatto sociale, psicologico, letterario e artistico della Peste Nera dovete cercare tra autori come Duby e altri.

The author is so convinced he is right in his views without looking at other perspectives. A total waste of money.