Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Teaching The Black Death, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

John Alberth, ed. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348- 1350: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 200 pages. $14.95.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ed. The Black Death. Problems in European Civilization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 206 pages. $37.99.

The Experience Of The Black Death In Bologna As Revealed By The Notarial Registers, Shona Kelly Wray

Quidditas

The Black Death of 1348 has fascinated readers and scholars for centuries. In this century it has been the subject of innumerable debates. Historians have argued back and forth about the demographic effects of the plague, about whether or not it instigated a period of economic depression, or even whether it represented a major event in history. Similarly, disagreement has raged, both inside and outside of the historical discipline, about the medical history and epidemiology of the plague. Fewer studies, however, have focused on the more immediate effects of the plague in localized areas. These scholars have attempted to uncover …

Review Essay: Francis X. Newman, Ed., Social Unrest In The Late Middle Ages: Papers Of The Fifteenth Annual Conference Oof The Center For Medieval And Early Renaissance Studies, Melanie V. Shirk

Quidditas

Francis X. Newman, ed., Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 9, 1986, 148 pp., ill., $16.00.

The Grand Peur Of 1348-49: The Shock Wave Of The Black Death In The German Southwest, Steven Rowan

Quidditas

The massacre of most fo the Jewish communities in Western Germany and what is now Switzerland between late 1348 and the middle of 1349 permanently altered the position of Jews in Central Europe, both by shifting the Jewish population eastward and by moving those Jews who remained behind to the periphery of economic society. A close examination of the chronology of the massacres on the local level rapidly disproves the traditional interpretation that the massacres were attacks of the classic 'scapegoat' type made in response to the onset of the first great modern European plague. Although the first massacres outside …

Violence And The Plague In Aragón, 1348-1351, Melanie V. Shirk

Quidditas

As Philip Ziegler has noted, "Statistics alone cannot provide an adequate picture of the Black Death." To say that one-quarter or one-third or one-half of Europe's population perished within a few years gains the reader's attention, but does not convey what such a brutal calamity meant to the average person at the time. The fourteenth century suffered many calamities, but the sudden and mysterious appearance of the Black Death, with no known cause or cure, msut surely have been the most terrifying.