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jhbandcats's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Parts of this history of the Black Death are quite dry - percentages of how many people died in certain cities in certain years, etc - and parts are vividly detailed, like the man saying he just buried his wife and five children with his own hands.
The author divides the book into chapters based on the lead-up to the plague, the various countries where it was epidemic, and the aftermath. He includes a chapter on the Jewish pogroms, how they - and occasionally lepers and / or the English - were blamed for poisoning wells to spread the plague.
That chapter was the hardest for me. I already knew the awful stories of the Black Death but I was ignorant of a lot of the retaliation. Amongst the general populace it was based on fear and ancient hatred. For the landowners, debtors, and municipalities, it was all economic: kill the wealthy Jewish moneylenders and erase all the debts, and confiscate all their property.
The reason I didn’t rate this higher - after all, it’s definitive scholarship - is the jarring contemporary phrases.
“the first theological Super Bowl”
“each armed with the equivalent of a thermonuclear device” [repeated mentions of nuclear bombs]
“slitting each other’s throats with the happy abandon of Mafia clans”
“pathogenic equivalent of a piranha”
“[Pope] Clement V … transformed the Church into a spiritual Pez dispenser”
Every time I came across one of these anomalies - and there were a lot more - it interrupted my reading concentration because all I could think of was how annoying it was.
That said, if you want a comprehensive overview of the Great Plague, this is a good place to start.
The author divides the book into chapters based on the lead-up to the plague, the various countries where it was epidemic, and the aftermath. He includes a chapter on the Jewish pogroms, how they - and occasionally lepers and / or the English - were blamed for poisoning wells to spread the plague.
That chapter was the hardest for me. I already knew the awful stories of the Black Death but I was ignorant of a lot of the retaliation. Amongst the general populace it was based on fear and ancient hatred. For the landowners, debtors, and municipalities, it was all economic: kill the wealthy Jewish moneylenders and erase all the debts, and confiscate all their property.
The reason I didn’t rate this higher - after all, it’s definitive scholarship - is the jarring contemporary phrases.
“the first theological Super Bowl”
“each armed with the equivalent of a thermonuclear device” [repeated mentions of nuclear bombs]
“slitting each other’s throats with the happy abandon of Mafia clans”
“pathogenic equivalent of a piranha”
“[Pope] Clement V … transformed the Church into a spiritual Pez dispenser”
Every time I came across one of these anomalies - and there were a lot more - it interrupted my reading concentration because all I could think of was how annoying it was.
That said, if you want a comprehensive overview of the Great Plague, this is a good place to start.
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Child death, Classism, Death, Medical content, Animal death, Blood, Grief, Religious bigotry, Terminal illness, Abandonment, Confinement, and Gore
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