Moot Thoughts & Musings

I've been perusing books on different medieval topics lately. I picked this one up today: The Black Death by Joseph Byrne (Greenwood Press, 2004). This is part of a series entitled Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World. The best way to describe it is a textbook on the Black Death. It seeks to give an overview of the causes and effects of the Black Death, how it affected medieval society in its various facets, psychologically, economically, artistically, etc. It has helpful sections including a chronology of the spread of the plague, a section of primary documents in translation, an annotated bibliography, a section of brief biographies of key individuals, etc. If I had to teach a course on the Black Death, this would be a wonderful resource, because it offers a brief, yet fairly comprehensive, introduction to the Black Death to the beginner. However, it's not really what I was looking for in a monograph--a book with a single thesis and supporting arguments. I'm glad it crossed my way anyway, though. (p.s. History teachers, this is a good book for high school, too, written at a comprehensible level and includes a glossary.)

One thing I've noticed about this book, and other more recent publications is the high percentage of it devoted to the Middle East. Western interest in Middle Eastern history has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, no doubt, also spiked by 9/11. I even took a course in the history of the Middle East as an undergraduate history major. What was once a peripheral subfield at Columbia and other institutions who can afford to staff subfields has filtered into the literature. I'm definitely glad, as it offers an important and very relevant facet to scholarship.

The Black Death incorporates increased scholarship in the medieval MidEast (middle ages middle east?) in some more blatent ways and other more subtle ones. The most obvious is chapter 7 entitled "Individual and Civic Responses in Cairo and Florence," wherein Byrne describes the entrance and effects each in these two cities, highlighting each city's particular culture and politics and how they were each affected, and finishing with a comparison of the response to the plague by each city. Knowing virtually nothing about medieval Cairo, I had everything to learn, and found it to be an interesting, informative chapter. (...though in keeping with the book's nature, as a whole, not too deep.)

Byrne also brings MidEast history in to his narrative in other, less straightforward ways. For instance, when mentioning the response by the world of medieval medicine, he also includes what the MidEastern doctors thought, as well as the Europeans. At the back of the book is a section of short biographies of key individuals of this era; many MidEasterners are included.

It's right that all this information should be included, as the Eastern world and the European world had significant exchange during this time. And I'm glad that as more Westerners learn this history, it is incorporated into more generalist, less specialist books as The Black Death.