Although much research tends to suggest that men are more susceptible to a variety of diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and parasites, we cannot assume that the same direction of sex-selection in mortality applied to diseases in the distant past such as Second Pandemic plagues. While the exact reasons for the sex-selective effect of late-medieval plague are unclear in the absence of further data, we suggest that simple inequities between the sexes in exposure to the disease may not have been a key driver.

Recent advances in paleoclimatology and the growing digital availability of large historical datasets on human activity have created new opportunities to investigate long‐term interactions between climate and society. However, noncritical use of historical datasets can create pitfalls, resulting in misleading findings that may become entrenched as accepted knowledge. We demonstrate pitfalls in the content, use and interpretation of historical datasets in research into climate and society interaction through a systematic review of recent studies on the link between climate and (a) conflict incidence, (b) plague outbreaks and (c) agricultural productivity changes. We propose three sets of interventions to overcome these pitfalls, which involve a more critical and multidisciplinary collection and construction of historical datasets, increased specificity and transparency about uncertainty or biases, and replacing inductive with deductive approaches to causality. This will improve the validity and robustness of interpretations on the long‐term relationship between climate and society.This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

Researchers have published several articles using historical data sets on plague epidemics using impressive digital databases that contain thousands of recorded outbreaks across Europe over the past several centuries. Through the digitization of preexisting data sets, scholars have unprecedented access to the historical record of plague occurrences. However, although these databases offer new research opportunities, noncritical use and reproduction of preexisting data sets can also limit our understanding of how infectious diseases evolved. Many scholars have performed investigations using Jean-Noël Biraben’s data, which contains information on mentions of plague from various kinds of sources, many of which were not cited. When scholars fail to apply source criticism or do not reflect on the content of the data they use, the reliability of their results becomes highly questionable. Researchers using these databases going forward need to verify and restrict content spatially and temporally, and historians should be encouraged to compile the work.

Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a 'light touch' of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Black Death was severe, perhaps no less severe than other parts of western Europe; that serious plagues continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and that the Black Death and recurring plagues spread over vast territories-including the countryside. The previous conception of a 'light touch' of plague in the Low Countries was created by the overprivileging of particular urban sources, and a failure to account for the rapid replenishment of cities via inward migration, which obscured demographic decimation. We suggest that the population of the Low Countries may not have recovered faster than other parts of western Europe but instead experienced a greater degree of post-plague rural-urban migration.