The Black Death Transformed

The Black Death Transformed has enjoyed considerable publicity—not surprising, perhaps, in an age where the threat of epidemic disease is so newsworthy. Nor has its author, Samuel Cohn, been modest about his claims. He contends that for a century and more historians have rushed to equate the magna mortalitas that first struck Europe in 1348 with bubonic plague, but have failed to consider the evidence carefully enough. All other historians have manipulated the facts to fit their theories, he insists, whereas by turning to the sources afresh and by comparing medieval and modern evidence he has been able to demonstrate that the Black Death cannot have been bubonic plague: its signs, symptoms, and epidemiologic behavior, he argues, are all inconsistent with descriptions of the twentieth-century disease

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