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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

  • In your blog, you argue that we should present students to understand the Black Death in a longer timeline, form the 13th to 19th 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 14th, 17th, and 19th centuries in places as geographically diverse as China, Western Europe, Iran, and East Africa?

  • in reply to Brian Moore

    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

Reply
  • in reply to Brian Moore

    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

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