SignificanceWhile our knowledge of modern plague reservoirs and their hosts is extensive, we have little to no knowledge about the origin of the Medieval plague pandemics or the routes of transmission involved in their spread. Prior genomic data provide a patchy low-resolution picture of the transmission dynamics involved during the Second Plague Pandemic, with only five distinct genomes. We have reevaluated all Medieval strains under the light of archaeological and historical evidence to carefully discuss the involvement of different transmission routes during the Second Plague Pandemic. Our interpretation showcases the importance of trade routes and human movements and further supports the identification of Yersinia pestis as the pathogenic agent of the so-called pestis secunda (1357–1366).

This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the 'Other', and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.In 2009 the so-called Mexican swine flu fuelled widespread fear of contagion but, contrary to expectation, failed to spark hatred and violence. Given the climate of mounting Mexican drug wars and U.S. antipathies towards Mexicans crossing borders and competing for jobs in a recession, this absence may strike us as especially surprising. Perhaps had mortality rates soared, the spectre of racial, class and religious prejudice may have loomed large, as with certain pandemics in the past. Are a disease's mortality rates, its fatality rates and rapidity of dissemination, or fear of a new and mysterious disease or a strain of it the critical factors that determine whether an epidemic will trigger hate and violence? Or does the pandemichate nexus depend less on the character of the disease and more on underlying social and political conditions already in existence at a particular time and place? Or do any of these explanations work? To what extent were scapegoating, violence against victims and the innocent, or 'the hate of class in times of epidemics', to cite René Baehrel, universal or near universal aspects of big epidemics? 1 More recent historians of mentalities and medicine have thought much the same as Baehrel: hate has been the normal consequence of pandemics. According to Carlo Ginzburg, "the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged"? 2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman: 'Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable'. 3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: 'deadly diseases' especially when 'there is no cure to hand' and the 'aetiology … is obscure … spawn sinister

Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of AD 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople,

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In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, resistance to public health measures contributed to the startling speed and persistence of this epidemic in the region. But how do we explain this resistance, and how have people in these communities understood their actions? By comparing these recent events to historical precedents during Cholera outbreaks in Europe in the 19th century we show that these events have not been new to history or unique to Africa. Community resistance must be analysed in context and go beyond simple single-variable determinants. Knowledge and respect of the cultures and beliefs of the afflicted is essential for dealing with threatening disease outbreaks and their potential social violence.

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The Black Death spurred monarchies and city-states across much of Western Europe to formulate new wage and price legislation. These legislative acts splintered in a multitude of directions that to date defy any obvious patterns of economic or political rationality. A comparison of labour laws in England, France, Provence, Aragon, Castile, the Low Countries, and the city-states of Italy shows that these laws did not flow logically from new post-plague demographics and economics-the realities of the supply and demand for labour. Instead, the new municipal and royal efforts to control labour and artisans' prices emerged from fears of the greed and supposed new powers of subaltern classes and are better understood in the contexts of anxiety that sprung forth from the Black Death's new horrors of mass mortality and destruction, resulting in social behaviour such as the flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans, and beggars. I ew syntheses of the Black Death appear yearly, but few of them explore the cultural, political, or economic consequences of the plague comparatively. Instead, perhaps taking their cue from contemporary chroniclers, historians continue to assume that the Black Death was a 'universal' catastrophe with 'universal' reactions and consequences across Europe. 1 But as debate about the social and economic impact of the Black Death between eastern and western Europe or France and England has highlighted, the social, economic, and psychological impact from more or less the same demographic collapse was not everywhere the same; regions might even react in ways that were diametrically opposed. 2 The Black Death and its successive waves, moreover, appear not to have hit all regions with the same ferocity and demographic consequences. A city such as Douai and its region in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe may not have borne 1 For a recent work that states this universal argument boldly, see Benedictow, Black Death . 2 See for instance, Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner debate , and for differences in the economic consequences of the Black Death between the Middle East and Europe, Borsch, Black Death in Egypt and England . N

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