Mystery Book Shipment #2
Received: 1 carton of literature from somewhere in Florida. flankleft has something to do with this.
The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried, Copyright 1983 The Free Press
The Black Death seems to have killed most of Europe, mainly in the middle of the fourteenth century.
First paragraph:
Like all infectious diseases, the Black Death has a natural history and can be properly understood only in that context. First, there is environment. Anyone traveling through Europe today would find it hard to imagine what the continent looked like a thousand years ago. There were no sprawling urban and industrial complexes, the outstanding characteristic of the last century, and surprisingly few towns of any size. Towns were usually far apart, located next to the sea or astride great rivers. By the middle of the twelfth century, a few urban centers in Italy and the Netherlands, and perhaps Paris, had fifty thousand or more people, but most claimed a thousand or so inhabitants. Nine out of ten Europeans lived in still smaller settlements, nucleated villages or hamlets of a few hundred people, fifteen to twenty miles apart. Both town and village were small and cramped, with woefully inadequate sanitation and transportation facilities. Ironically, in the confines of their small but isolated settlements, most people lived close together and had little privacy.
This book is information-dense. The first third feels like a list: placename, years, mortality. Endnotes abound. Then the next third seems to be scattershot, delving deeply into a few areas, such as Wales, or monks, or Middle East. Overall it's a good source, but has certain kinds of weaknesses: early on I noticed words, such as "epizootic" and "concomitant" were used a lot. A lot. Also, the contemporary sources are nearly all debunked, without alternative sources (e.g., someone wrote that 60,000 students at Oxford died (sourced), and the author writes that Oxford only had 2,000 students (not sourced)). And, the text of the book refers several times to how it informs us of the roles of climate and nutrition, but doesn't actually have much on either topic. Finally (maybe this is normal), the extensive endnotes and bibliography refer to works by Gottfried -- he used himself as a source.
Despite the book's faults, it's an amazing topic. Lots of people died. The Black Death certainly changed progress, church, medicine and architecture. I'm sure it changed a lot more, too, but those are areas of human interest that, as far as history is concerned, may as well have stayed the same from 1250 to the Renaissance.
I was particularly interested in the "laicitization" or secularization of Europe. Here was a time when much of the Catholic church moved or died. The book doesn't say it, but I think it's because those ordained cared for the sick, and the sick were contagious. My conjecture: the church allowed the laity to perform acts, such as extreme unction, due to lack of priests. The populace began things, such as flagellation, pogroms, and church rebellion, because they'd become tremendously religious, but without leaders.
Not my conjecture, but Gottfried's, as food became plentiful and labor became expensive (New Orleans, anyone?), the manorial lords lost their local power, and the national kings became very powerful, changing the role of landlords and national boundaries.
Overall, a good read -- although I better enjoy the kind of narrative history revising done by the likes of Simon Winchester and Thomas Cahill.
Mystery Book Shipment #1
The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried, Copyright 1983 The Free Press
The Black Death seems to have killed most of Europe, mainly in the middle of the fourteenth century.
First paragraph:
Like all infectious diseases, the Black Death has a natural history and can be properly understood only in that context. First, there is environment. Anyone traveling through Europe today would find it hard to imagine what the continent looked like a thousand years ago. There were no sprawling urban and industrial complexes, the outstanding characteristic of the last century, and surprisingly few towns of any size. Towns were usually far apart, located next to the sea or astride great rivers. By the middle of the twelfth century, a few urban centers in Italy and the Netherlands, and perhaps Paris, had fifty thousand or more people, but most claimed a thousand or so inhabitants. Nine out of ten Europeans lived in still smaller settlements, nucleated villages or hamlets of a few hundred people, fifteen to twenty miles apart. Both town and village were small and cramped, with woefully inadequate sanitation and transportation facilities. Ironically, in the confines of their small but isolated settlements, most people lived close together and had little privacy.
This book is information-dense. The first third feels like a list: placename, years, mortality. Endnotes abound. Then the next third seems to be scattershot, delving deeply into a few areas, such as Wales, or monks, or Middle East. Overall it's a good source, but has certain kinds of weaknesses: early on I noticed words, such as "epizootic" and "concomitant" were used a lot. A lot. Also, the contemporary sources are nearly all debunked, without alternative sources (e.g., someone wrote that 60,000 students at Oxford died (sourced), and the author writes that Oxford only had 2,000 students (not sourced)). And, the text of the book refers several times to how it informs us of the roles of climate and nutrition, but doesn't actually have much on either topic. Finally (maybe this is normal), the extensive endnotes and bibliography refer to works by Gottfried -- he used himself as a source.
Despite the book's faults, it's an amazing topic. Lots of people died. The Black Death certainly changed progress, church, medicine and architecture. I'm sure it changed a lot more, too, but those are areas of human interest that, as far as history is concerned, may as well have stayed the same from 1250 to the Renaissance.
I was particularly interested in the "laicitization" or secularization of Europe. Here was a time when much of the Catholic church moved or died. The book doesn't say it, but I think it's because those ordained cared for the sick, and the sick were contagious. My conjecture: the church allowed the laity to perform acts, such as extreme unction, due to lack of priests. The populace began things, such as flagellation, pogroms, and church rebellion, because they'd become tremendously religious, but without leaders.
Not my conjecture, but Gottfried's, as food became plentiful and labor became expensive (New Orleans, anyone?), the manorial lords lost their local power, and the national kings became very powerful, changing the role of landlords and national boundaries.
Overall, a good read -- although I better enjoy the kind of narrative history revising done by the likes of Simon Winchester and Thomas Cahill.
Mystery Book Shipment #1