Black Death

[zotz]

A while back, someone referred to a book supporting y.pestis as the cause of the Black Death. Unfortunately I can't find the entry, so as a general question - what was it? It wasn't Benedictow's book, was it?

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Something at the back of my mind suggests it was blackmetalbaz doing the referring, so you could try prodding him if answers are not forthcoming.

[zotz]

I doubt he'd be recommending books supporting pestis, as it's his view that it probably wasn't. I thought it might be kate_r, but it doesn't seem to have been.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, recommending and referring are two different things.

The context of the reference may well have been "and the stupid halfwit author of X actually believes..."

:)

[zotz]

It was a little more approving than that.

[blackmetalbaz.livejournal.com]

*shrugs* I'm not dogmatic about it. I'm going broadly on the account of the evidence from The Biology Of Plagues, although if there's more recent evidence I'd obviously like to see it.

[zotz]

That's why I said "probably". I haven't read this book, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out exactly what it was in case I want to in the future.

[everild.livejournal.com]

That's a fairly standard suggested cause of the Black Death so lots of people have discussed it - Benedictow's book is the most recently published study I believe, although I haven't read it yet. My interest in the BD really focuses on its effects rather than what it was, so I'm not entirely up on all the theories (the anthrax one caused quite a stir at the time though). But this doesn't stop me talking about buboes when I give a lecture on the subject to my first years :-)

[zotz]

I'm not really convinced by the suggestions that it's something else. Pestis seems most likely. I was at a seminar given by someone from Porton who worked on a vaccine, and he was taking absolutely as read that it was pestis that was responsible, and was citing population genetic evidence from its genome accordingly.

[everild.livejournal.com]

It does seem as though it's making things needlessly complicated to argue that it's anything else really. While they may not have known how to deal with it medieval observers could certainly tell that there were different versions of the plague that killed you in different ways and at different rates, and these seem to fit the various known versions of pestis - and also to explain why it was able to survive over the winter etc. Although on the other hand at times basic plague may have been complicated by other diseases too, and after the first main outbreak in 1348-9 it becomes endemic in any case and keeps coming back at regular intervals for the next few centuries, with the last big outbreak in 1665 of course.

[zotz]

That's one of the arguments that it was pestis - it kept coming back and was recognised as the same disease each time. More generally, the case didn't seem airtight so I haven't quite given way to it. Now it seems to be slipping away again.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

It was me, and I was referring to Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, which I have not read as it's rare and v. expensive, but the Guardian had been talking about it, saying that if Western historians of the plague had read that, there'd be no doubt about y. pestis being the culprit. (I haven't read the book(s) that claims that it isn't, what with them also being very expensive, if not rare).

[zotz]

Right. Thanks. I was wondering about that. There's a copy in the Uni Library here, but I won't have time to read it anytime soon.

[zotz]

Wow. You're not kidding about it being expensive.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

No. And as I said at the time, the only reason it was a cheap as it was, is that the US dollar was in the toilet.

It's precisely the sort of thing I'd be willing to spend a fair amount of money on, but even if I was still in full time academia there's no way I could justify that.