The Black Death, 1346-1353

Reviewed by: The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History Jon Arrizabalaga Ole J. Benedictow . The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2004. xviii + 433 pp. Ill. $50.00 (0-85115-943-5). Over the course of much of the twentieth century, historians' interest in great pandemics of the past, and particularly in the paradigm of the Black Death, waned. During recent decades, however, this literary genre has been refueled by the so-called return of epidemics, and by the changes in the social perception of risk that AIDS and the newly emerging diseases have raised in the developed world. Ole Benedictow's allegedly complete history of the 1348 Black Death is a contribution to the plague industry that extends the endless historical debate on the origins, nature, dissemination, and impact of this pandemic in Europe. His starting point is the assumption, based on classic historical and medical studies, that the [End Page 161] Black Death is identical to bubonic plague. Although he may have dealt at length with this topic in his previous monograph (Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries: Epidemiological Studies, 1996), only fourteen pages of this new, four-hundred-page study have been allotted to a discussion of it, with no reference to any other recent work—e.g., books by Graham Twigg (1983), David Herlihy (1997), Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan (2001), and Samuel Cohn (2002)—dealing with such a historiographically controversial issue. The core of Benedictow's monograph is his thorough tracking of the Black Death as it passed through Europe and the Mediterranean area (part 2, pp. 55–224) and his knowledgeable discussion of its impact on mortality (part 4, pp. 243–384). Through a careful analysis of many sources, both primary and secondary, he provides a chronological reconstruction of how the Black Death swept the whole of Europe, from the legendary siege of Kaffa, in the Crimea, in early 1347, through the main European networks of trade and travel by land and sea, to its late appearance in Moscow in 1353. This historical reconstruction is expressively represented in a two-page colored map at the beginning of the volume. In addition, Benedictow's extensive and judicious use of demographic and economic studies—mostly dealing with medieval Spain, Italy, France, and England—has led him to substantially raise the mortality rate from the Black Death and its collateral effects to about 60 percent of the whole European population—some 50 million of its estimated 80 million people. The dramatic population fall caused by the 1348 Black Death and maintained by the ensuing plague epidemics (he has by no means dealt with the latter) leads Benedictow to a short, conclusive part 5 (pp. 387–94), based on a handful of historical studies from the 1960s and 1970s, in which he insists on the traditional thesis that the Black Death was a turning point between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, and claims this scourge as the critical agent of historical change in the whole of Europe at the time. Benedictow's reconstruction of how the Black Death disseminated, which evokes William McNeill's and Alfred Crosby's discussions of the global history of epidemics, repeatedly advances a military metaphor: the Black Death as the siege by a combined army of bacilli, fleas, and rats that attacks by land, water (sea and rivers), and air using strategies tailored to specific environments, available means of transport, and local cultures. The reader can find many metaphorical figures such as "bridgeheads," "metastatic leaps," "inundations," "refugees," "naval tactics," and "average daily paces." Benedictow's plausible reconstruction of the Black Death's spread and his sophisticated approach to demographic and epidemiologic issues contrasts with his rough, old-fashioned conceptualizations of the social and cultural history of medieval medicine, and his apparent unfamiliarity with modern scholarship in this area. His narrative is a one-directional account of the warfare by the bacillus-flea-rat trio, where there is little room for any historical relation between culture and disease. Yet, despite its conceptual flaws, this monograph is valuable in its intellectually ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of how the Black

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