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Redefining the Black Death Narrative with Monica Green // March 14 - 16, 2022

Kathy Hays

We are honored to welcome  as our Exchange host. She is a historian of medicine and Global Health, specializing in the history of medieval Europe. Monica has spent over forty years researching the intellectual and social aspects of premodern medicine and has won numerous fellowships and awards for her work. Over the last fifteen years, she has focused her research on understanding the history of the world’s major infectious diseases, including the Black Plague.  

In her blogpost, How Long Will It (Did It) Last? Redefining the Black Death as the “Second Plague Pandemic, Green takes up an issue she has been researching since 2014. In the opening essay of the collection, Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, she argued that new findings from genetics, as well as expansive investigations by historians working on regions outside of Europe, made clear that the Eurocentric focus of Black Death studies was leaving too much of the pandemic's history out of the picture. Since then, it has become even more apparent that the Black Death as experienced in western Eurasia reflected only part of the story. Her research suggests the Second Plague Pandemic had its origins in Mongol military campaigns of the thirteenth century, not the period of comparatively peaceful commerce of the mid-fourteenth century, which challenges the current Eurocentric narrative. 

Her blog addresses how to tell a new story that alters our traditional chronological boundaries. It often takes time for a new narrative to become accepted but it’s essential to tell the complete narrative. As we examine and try to make sense of our own current situation with the COVID pandemic, it is important to turn to history, modern science, and public health research.  

In this Exchange, Monica welcome’s questions about how to teach pandemic stories. She’s happy to talk about the evidence, whether genetic or documentary, that supports the “new paradigm” of plague studies that she and other researchers are now advancing. 

The Exchange will be “Live” March 14 –16 but go ahead and start posting your questions for Monica Green in the comments below. You may want to ask about her studies of both historical and current pandemics. Have you encountered any challenges when teaching about the Black Death or other global pandemics?  We’d also love to learn from you on strategies you use to examine the Black Death and comparisons you’ve made to the current pandemic How do your students respond? Let’s learn from each other! 

If you’d like to additional resources, here are links to Monica Green’s published work. 

(https://independentscholar.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen) 

On Learning How to Teach the Black Death." 

American Historical Review 

Parents

  • This is such a great and timely topic, thanks for bringing your expertise and research to our community.  One of the things that I have stressed with my 6th graders over the years when examining the Black Death was the idea of how the plague spread.  While the traditional narrative has been the rat and flea connection, there have been recent theories about pneumonic plague or human parasites such as lice.  Can you discuss these ideas as being possible explanations for how rapidly the plague spread throughout populations during the late 1340s and early 1350s, as well as the later outbreaks of plague?

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  • This is such a great and timely topic, thanks for bringing your expertise and research to our community.  One of the things that I have stressed with my 6th graders over the years when examining the Black Death was the idea of how the plague spread.  While the traditional narrative has been the rat and flea connection, there have been recent theories about pneumonic plague or human parasites such as lice.  Can you discuss these ideas as being possible explanations for how rapidly the plague spread throughout populations during the late 1340s and early 1350s, as well as the later outbreaks of plague?

Children
  • in reply to Zachary Cain

    Hello Zachary,

    Thanks for this great question. Yes, it has indeed been proposed that there were other mechanisms for plague's historical spread beyond the rat-flea-bubonic plague model usually described when people talk about plague. So, let me respond in two parts: first to answer about pneumonic plague and then to address the question of whether human fleas (Pullex irritans) or lice (Pediculus humanus) can play a role in plague spread.

    But first, let me quickly summarize what can and cannot be known concretely about plague transmission in the premodern past. As my blog and that by Bennett Sherry explained, we can now be 100% sure that Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) was involved in late medieval and early modern outbreaks. That's because the complete genome of the bacterium has been retrieved. HOWEVER, while we can be certain that Y. pestis was the pathogen involved, we have no way of knowing HOW it got into people's bodies. The genome will be the same whether transmission was bubonic (via arthropod bite through the skin, and thence spreading through the lymph system), pneumonic (inhaled via the lungs and getting directly into the blood system), septicemic (entering the bloodstream via a cut or animal bite), or gastrointestinal (entering thru eating contaminated food).

    Although work is underway trying to learn more about rodents that may have been involved in plague transmission, that work is very difficult because rodents' bones are very fragile and don't preserve very well. To date, only one (one!) rat has been found in an archaeological site that has been proven to be infected by plague. As for arthropods (the parasite vectors), currently we have no trace at all. So all work that has been done on this question is from inference only.

    Okay, now to your main questions. How could we know whether cases were instances of bubonic vs pneumonic plague? As I said, the genome of the pathogen won't answer that question, nor will any other information that can be gleaned from a victim's skeletal remains. The main difference between modes of transmission will be the disease interval. Bubonic plague, as we understand it now, will usually kill (if no antibiotic treatment is given) within 6-10 days from the point of infection. Pneumonic plague kills much more quickly, perhaps in 2-3 days of infection. So, if we get reports of people dying "almost instantaneously", or dying having only spoken to someone who was ill, then those might have been pneumonic cases. Pneumonic cases are most common (here drawing on modern case studies) in winter conditions or in crowded conditions, or when one person is caring for a family member (continuous close contact). It is likely that in cases where there are a lot of deaths in an enclosed environment, in a very short period of time, that we are looking at peaks of pneumonic transmission. (Again, there is nothing different about the pathogen in these cases; it's simply a matter of how and where the organism enters the victim's body.)

    In regard to human fleas or lice, those are both *possible* vectors for spread of plague. But were they the *normal* modes of spread? Again, we do not as yet have any archaeological evidence one way or another. We do certainly know that people of the past were parasitized by lice, and carried other diseases that are readily spread by lice (such as typhus). But do lice move around fast enough to explain the speed we see plague arriving in different locales? That hasn't been demonstrated yet. Also, plague kills the lice, too, so a viable model would have to explain how they might function as hosts. All the same questions apply to human fleas.

    In short, we still have many questions!