1 Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348–1500

Abstract

What disease or diseases caused the recurrent, demographically punishing epidemics that Europeans called plague? During the last twenty years a once prevalent historical consensus about causes and consequences of European plagues has dissolved, prompting new archival research as well as novel technological and interdisciplinary approaches to material evidence. The core debates about the history of plague are not, however, limited to scholars of medieval and early modern Europe. Molecular biologists over the last decade have determined that the organism that causes plague today, Yersinia pestis, is a relatively recent emergent pathogen descended from a significantly less lethal gastro-intestinal parasite, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Furthermore, fifty years ago microbiologists accepted a model of three different ''biovars''-biochemically different variants-of Yersinia pestis, which were tidily aligned to three historical pandemic waves: antiqua, mediaevalis, and orientalis. That synthesis, too, is seriously challenged. There are instead at least eight Yersinia pestis strains and four biovars, and all have emerged within the last 5000 to 20,000 years. 1 This organism remains a likely perpetrator of the great plagues in Europe because all Yersinia pestis biovars can be extraordinarily lethal in human bodies. Most medievalists, including those who doubt that the Black Death and subsequent plagues could have been caused by Yersinia pestis, make a modern assumption that the Black Death indeed had some unique microbial cause. No one yet has argued in a sustained fashion that the plague was a ''perfect storm'' of many different epidemic infectious diseases, but one could. 2 Nor has a radical scepticism emerged-for example, that the causes of each and every local or regional epidemic called peste/pestilentia by contemporaries need to be investigated separately, unrelated to other local contexts-but that, too, might be possible. If we would be truly rigorous, we cannot assume that a ''plague'' in one place was due to the same specific microbial cause as a pestilence in another locality, even

Dangers of Noncritical Use of Historical Plague Data

“…Using references by contemporaries is problematic, given the terms peste or pestilentia were often indiscriminate references to all sorts of afflictions ( 30 ). Only starting roughly around the second half of the 15th century do we find more explicit differentiation in the descriptions of diseases in the Low Countries and Italy ( 31 , 32 ), and even these descriptions still were by no means systematic. For many of the putative late-medieval outbreaks after the initial Black Death, most literary sources do not mention key signs or symptoms, such as the combination of buboes, fever, and a rapidity of death.…”

Bioarchaeology of Past Epidemic- and Famine-Related Mass Burials with Respect to Recent Findings from the Czech Republic

“…Although many of the worst pre-industrial epidemics appear to have been caused by the bubonic plague, the range of epidemics that are referred to as "plagues" is much larger (Alfani, Murphy, 2017). The causes of epidemics referred to as "peste" or "pestilential" by contemporaries must be investigated separately because it cannot be assumed that a ''plague'' in one place was due to the same specific microbial agent as those in other places, even during the Black Death (Carmichael, 2008). In particular, populations weakened by malnutrition/starvation could have easily succumbed to influenza, typhus, dysentery, smallpox, typhoid fever, relapsing fever, or another highly-transmissible pathogen (Smith et al, 2012;Andam et al, 2016;Guellil et al, 2018).…”

The “First Mortality” as a Time Marker in Fourteenth-Century Provence

“…As Ann Carmichael writes, "[W]ithin some finite period of time after the great mortality became part of their past, survivors began to characterize its distinctiveness from other epidemics." 3 But they did not have a last past plague to compare it to.…”