The Justinianic Plague and Global Pandemics

The Making of the Plague Concept

Bibliographic Data

ID5728047
AuthorsMerle Eisenberg (0000-0003-1556-5752, corresponding author), L Mordechai (0000-0002-8474-0473, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume125
Issue5
Pages1632-1667
Publication date2020-12-29
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ahr/rhaa510
OpenAlexW3116169885
LanguageEN
Citations received13

This article explores how plague-as an idea-became an ahistorical independent agent of historical change. It focuses on the case of the Justinianic Plague (ca. 541-750 c.e.), the first major recorded plague pandemic in Mediterranean history, which has increasingly been used to explain significant demographic, political, social, economic, and cultural change during late antiquity (ca. 300-800 c.e.). We argue that the Justinianic Plague retains its great historiographic power-namely, its supposed destructive impact over two centuries-because it evokes a terrifying myth of what plague should do rather than because of conclusive evidence of what it did. We define this historiographic power as the plague concept. It includes three key features: extensive chronology (lasting for two centuries), mortality (catastrophic death toll), and geography (global). The plague concept is built on three interdisciplinary types of evidence (here termed truisms): rats, climate, and paleogenetics. Our article traces how scientists constructed the plague concept in the first half of the twentieth century, and how historians entered the discussion in the last third of that century. As historians engaged in Justinianic Plague research, they used the plague concept to frame their arguments without problematizing its presence or contesting features that scientists had constructed decades earlier

Ancient history · Archaeology · Chronology · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Death toll · Genealogy · Geography · Pandemic · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Demography · History · Law · Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

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