HIST 635 The Black Death
The Black Death, a pandemic of plague in the middle of the 14 th century, was the most consequential demographic event in recorded human history, spanning three continents and resulting in a death toll in the tens of millions. There is a long historiography concerned with its effects: social and economic, religious and political, cultural and even artistic. More recently, studies of this pandemic have placed it within the broader context of climatic, environmental, and epidemic global history, and even more recently bioarchaeological research has transformed our understanding of the historical disease itself. This course surveys the long chain of
secondary literature on the subject covering not just Europe but also Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and in particular focuses upon current understanding of disease as a historical factor and the latest revisions of our understanding of the history of plague.