Book #85 of 2021:
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
It’s March 2021, and I’ve read quite a few titles over the past year looking at the global history of pandemics, the science behind their causes, and the strategies that led to their ultimate cures. This 2005 volume on the medieval ‘Black Death’ doesn’t deal too much with that second category, and the third is somewhat irrelevant, since the proposed solutions at the time were neither rigorous nor effective and the disease largely died out on its own.
However, as a deep dive into what it was like for people in Europe and Asia experiencing the catastrophe firsthand, this is a valuable and well-researched guide with the expected additional poignancy for a reader in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Author John Kelly goes into brutal detail about both the biological course of the infection and the socioeconomic ramifications of its spread, and if nothing else, that provides a good perspective on how our own situation could be so much worse. (Many lives continue to be lost to the novel coronavirus, yet nowhere near half the population of any given locale.)
Kelly writes not only of the emotional cost to such an unfathomable casualty count, but also of the immediate practical impact, from a spike in graphic antisemitic violence to the difficulties of adjudicating court cases, conducting trade, or really carrying out any other regular pre-plague activity. Drawing on primary records of the era, the writer wanders from city to city — mostly in the south and west — to paint a sorrowful and informative picture of how each area would have witnessed the calamity and its aftereffects.
★★★★☆
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