The Black Death and the Transformation of the West

A Review

Herlihy , David . The Black Death and the Transformation of the West Cambridge , Massachusetts : Harvard University Press , 1997 Any attempt to understand the Black Death requires a scholar who can undertake a truly multi-disciplinary investigation . Many of the questions that interest modern scholars cannot be answered directly How religious were the poor in the middle ages ? Given that these people were illiterate , and that the literate classes had little sympathy for recording their lives , it requires considerable concentration and creativity to uncover information . Fortunately , David Herlihy was such a

scholar . While he acknowledges in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West1 1David Herlihy , The Black Death and the Transformation of the West . Cambridge , Massachusetts : Harvard University Press , 1997 . Because this book is the only source cited in this , citations will be given by page numbers in parentheses that many of our answers must be tentative at best , he manages to probe a remarkable range of sources to show that many questions can be addressed . For example , by comparing rosters of troop musters , various church records , and the like , he finds that parents named their children after saints of the Church quite rarely n the years before the Black Death . In contrast , the prevalence of saints '92 name , and particularly the names of saints associated with miracle healings soars after the plague , indicating a more religious attitude . It is this ability to draw on markedly diverse sources and to bring them together that makes in small book , The Black Death and the Transformation of the West rewarding

Herlihy begins with a stark fact : humanity has never faced a pestilence like the Black Death . When it struck Europe in 1348-50 , it killed some two thirds of the population of the continent (17 ) Equally remarkably , we do not know what this disease was . The term '93Black Death '94 was not used when the pestilence was raging . That term was not applied to this pestilence until the sixteenth century , and the term '93black '94 connotes '93dreadful '94 or '93terrible '94 rather than referring to any symptom of the disease (19 ) '93Black Death '94 was a literary device coined in the nineteenth century (19-20

The scientific term , '93bubonic plague '94 was first used by a Swiss microbiologist attending to patients of a pestilence in Hong Kong in 1894 (20-21 ) The determination that the pestilence in Europe in the fourteenth century was similar to this bubonic plague was based on a comparison of the Hong Kong disease with the surviving accounts of the pestilence of five hundred years before (20 ) This determination is probably wrong

To show this , Herlihy analyzes what modern science knows of the bubonic plague . Notably , bubonic plague is not passed from person to person (26 ) The bubonic plague is spread by the bites of fleas carrying the bubonic plague bacillus . Further , the fleas which carry the germ prefer to live on the bodies of rats rather than on human bodies . Only when...