Interesting, but uneven

books:


	• In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made Norman Cantor Harper Perennial, 2002 - 272 pages view larger image
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Interesting, but uneven

This is an interesting book about one of the direst slice of history. In just three years (1347 - 1350), the Plague will have wiped out over a third of Western Europe. Some countries incurred lesser but significant recurrence of the plague centuries later, including England in 1665. England will recover its pre-plague population level not until 1750 or four centuries later.

Gathering material from the scientific literature, the author shares that the Plague was a pandemic associated with two different diseases. The first one is the bubonic plague we all know associated with in chronological order: fever, black buboes, diarrhea, vomiting, and finally death by respiratory failure. This incubation took two weeks. But, historical accounts uncovered a second and different disease that killed in just four days without fever or buboes. Historians believed this second disease was a transmitted cattle disease: anthrax. This second disease accounts for the rapid spread of the Plague northward at a speed that defies how the bubonic plague alone could have been transmitted (mainly through black rats).

Scientists uncovered a rare gene mutant that would have been present and protected some of the European survivors from the Plague. This same gene present in 15% of Western European Caucasians today protects against HIV/AIDS.

In 1340, 60% of Western Europe's wealth and all its political power were held by just 300 families. They were all multi-billionaires in today's money. By the next generation, the Plague had created a huge labor shortage in farming in rural areas. The much lower surviving population gave much leverage to the peasants who became desperately needed by the "billionaires" and monasteries to work the arable land. This lead to the abolition of serfdom and the onset of flexible labor markets associated with competitive contractual wages and labor mobility. This preceded the upcoming agricultural and industrial revolution.

The third chapter describes how foreign policy at the time was often waged by arranging marriages between monarchies of different countries. In this case, a 15 year old British princess, Joan Plantagenet, was to marry Prince Pedro from Castile. This was a way for her father King Edward III to eventually annex Castile to England. They were to wed in Bordeaux. Princess Joan became one of the Plague's victims. And, the course of British foreign policy was affected forever.

At the time, women had a much accelerated life span. They got married and gave birth in their mid teens. They hit menopause at 30 (so the author says on page 42). And, their life span was very often shortened by death during childbirth. Aristocratic men often engaged in serial marriages not so much because of infidelities but because of high female mortality. The men died in their mid forties because of disease or through battles.

Climate change did contribute to the Plague's devastation. The climate went through a cooling period that lasted until the 15th century. It impacted crops, diet, health, and caused bouts of famines in the 1320s. With compromised health, populations could not withstand the Plague.

Chapter 5 focuses on the impact of Thomas Bradwardine, clergyman and Oxford University academic, being victim of the Plague in 1349. Bradwardine was a world class scientist who advocated the separation of science and religion. He believed space was infinite with many other worlds similar to ours. He may have been on the way to uncover the scientific method within the Western World. His progress, however, were not advanced enough to leave a trace within the history of science. This is because algebra was still too primitive. Calculus did not exist. And, instruments of observations from the microscope to the telescope also did not exist. The author feels that the Plague stopped Bradwardine from revolutionizing the science of his day. This is utopian because Bradwardine was already 59 upon his death, much beyond the age when geniuses develop break through concepts. Also, the scientific method had been developed by Ibn al-Haytham at the turn of the first millennium over 300 years before Bradwardine's related cogitations. For much in depth study on this subject, I recommend A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future

Other chapters cover equally interesting subjects. The Plague apparently accelerated the development in England of real estate and estate law as marriages, deaths, inheritances were the major factors in accumulating wealth through land ownership. The body of law developed at the time still represents a foundation of contemporary British laws. The chapter on the Jewish Conspiracy is also interesting. Under torture, Jews admitted to having spread the Plague by poisoning the wells of cities. In turn, they were often rounded up and burned. They were also often sequestered in their own quarters. The latter, although poverty stricken, were reasonably clean and much less rat infested than the remainder of the cities. As a result, Jews survival rate was much higher and the European Christian anti-Semitic population further demonized them because of it.

The last three chapters expand on some of the more far fetched explanations of the Plague and also on the Plague's implication on the course of history. Those chapters lack direction as the author often does not clearly justifies what are the best explanations of the Plague's cause or ultimate historical implications.

The author conveys much information about epidemiology and history of pandemics. I recommend a much better book on the subject Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, takingmillion lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded in a haze of myths.

Now, Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.

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