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Darrera modificació: 2026-10-15
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Green, Monica H., "Straining the History of Infectious Diseases: Europe's Two Black Deaths (en prensa)", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, *** (***).
- Resum
- In the third decade of the twenty-first century, Black Death studies are being transformed. Retrieving molecular fragments of plague's causative organism, Yersinia pestis, from medieval burials, paleogenomics has made it possible not simply to identify the organism's presence, but to discern evolutionarily distinct strains. Simultaneously, advances in bioarchaeology expand the physical evidence of mass mortality events in European history. Chronologically rigorous reinterrogation of new and old sources brings hitherto unseen trajectories and timelines of the late medieval pandemic into view. This paper proposes that a less virulent lineage of Y. pestis circulated in Europe several decades before a second, far more lethal wave broke out in the Mediterranean in 1347/1348 CE. The initial strain caused both isolated mortalities and, when combined with climatic events and famine, epidemic episodes. Sudden deaths, whether isolated or epidemic, were initially categorized as poisoning, giving rise to lethal persecution of suspect individuals and groups.
- Matèries
- Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- Notes
- Nota de la autora:
After some delay, I finally got the information I needed from the Bulletin of the History of Medicine about production of the written form of the lecture I presented at the AAHM meeting in June: “Straining the History of Infectious Diseases: Europe's Two Black Deaths.” I've now submitted the final version to the journal AND I've posted the pre-print typescript (downloadable) on my personal Knowledge Commons page. So, anybody who needs it before it's formally published (probably June next year, given BHM's production schedule) can have access to it. Please use the following format to cite it:
Monica H. Green, “Straining the History of Infectious Diseases: Europe's Two Black Deaths,” forthcoming in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, pre-print posted on Knowledge Commons, 12 October 2026, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/j36yx-1c046  .
Given the limited word count for the abstract, this does not fully capture the whole argument. Besides documenting the presence of plague in Europe before the Black Death, I also demonstrate that it was this early-arriving lineage that persisted in Europe up to the 18th century.
- URL
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/j36yx-1c046 .
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