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

In your blog, you argue that we should present students to understand the Black Death in a longer timeline, form the 13^th to 19^th century. This seems like a great opportunity to think about change and continuity over time. Can you give us any quick pointers about best practices for comparing responses to and effects of plague outbreaks in the 14^th, 17^th, and 19^th centuries in places as geographically diverse as China, Western Europe, Iran, and East Africa?

Wow, what a great question! I could spend all week trying to answer it! I will likely return to this in follow-up posts as thoughts come to me, but let me answer quickly with what comes immediately to mind.

First of all, as I explained, my thinking about a "unified" history of plague starts from the premise of a biological understanding of the disease. Because of developments in evolutionary genetics, we can now track the disease across continents and across centuries. So *we* know that it's all the same disease in all those times and places.

But in order to make that biological knowledge into something that we understand as HISTORY, we need to reconstruct how historical human actors perceived what they were experiencing. To take East Africa as an example, in a study I published in 2018 I collected what *might* refer to experiences of plague found in some legends about a royal figure. (Here's the link to that study, which was published open-access: https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125. See Paragraph 54 for the story about Kawumpuli was the name of the son of the historical kabaka (king) Kayemba (c.1670–c.1700), who came to function as a protector against plague.) Is there a way we can start to ask questions about how societies frame pandemics in mythic terms? Certainly, we have a number of sources from both Christian Europe and the Islamic world that frame plague as a judgement of God. Are there ways to ask similar questions comparatively for other times and places?

One of the questions I'm working through in my own research is the question of how "medicalized" plague is in different contexts. In the Islamic tradition, writing about plague is done both by physicians but also by religious commentators. Because it is such a swiftly moving disease (just days between infection and death), does that create a different psychic impact on societies in terms of the way they cope and respond to it?

Here is where I see great potential in bringing together many kinds of evidence to do case studies. We can expect that genetics evidence for plague will continue to become increasingly available. Plague (Yersinia pestis) is the most "successful" pathogen in terms of retrieval, because it replicates so profusely just prior to death. So could we look for instances where we have documented plague, documentary records, and a large body of contextualizing evidence to look at differing cultural responses to plague? There is excellent work being done across the whole spectrum of history in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), into the Ottoman period, so it will soon be possible to see the uninterrupted history of that region. Will comparable work soon be available for, say, China? That remains to be seen.

For now, I think there is a range of source material we can piece together from materials already available. Your query made me realize that I had forgotten to include in my general bibliography on the early centuries of the 2nd Plague Pandemic (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104263744463668175127&rtpof=true&sd=true) this recent collection:

Bell, Dean Phillip, ed. Plague in the Early Modern World: A Documentary History (London: Routledge, 2019).

One thing we can also do in constructing comparative case studies is bringing in the hugely important question of what OTHER health conditions and social structures affect the experience of pandemic outbreaks. The present COVID pandemic has made us more acutely aware than ever before is that infectious diseases always come into societies that are fractured along various lines. Those, too, might be frameworks for developing comparative studies. I imagine there are already members of the OER Community who have experience with this.

By the way, the bibliography I referred to above only goes up to ca. 1500 in its coverage. For those looking for a quick list of studies on other periods of plague history, I prepared a bibliography for the students I was teaching this term at Stanford: https://www.academia.edu/65835378/Why_Plague_Changed_Everything_Special_Assignments_for_Week_4_Winter_2022_History_243D_343D_. How to "translate" that scholarship into classroom assignments is a big question, of course. But this is also one of the reasons I think plague is "good to teach with": plague also reached new parts of the world during the Third Plague Pandemic (dates differ--of course!--but roughly late 19th century until mid-20th century). Looking at local responses to plague in the Americas, etc., gives us other possibilities for comparative work.

Monica Green

Previously my comparison has been more narrow and focused on the scope that we asses with Investigation 8.  The resources you shared will help me to expand that scope to include a wider time frame and more locations around the world when learning about the plague with my students. 

I feel the same way, Brian. I also like your continuity and change connection. When we finished the Investigation 8 packet earlier this week, I had kids use the CCOT placemat from WHP to use for analysis of the two plagues.

I feel the same way, Brian. I also like your continuity and change connection. When we finished the Investigation 8 packet earlier this week, I had kids use the CCOT placemat from WHP to use for analysis of the two plagues.