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Darrera modificació: 2018-06-06
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Green, Monica H., "The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World by Bruce Campbell", Science, 4/1 (2018), ***.
- Resum
- This essay review examines the major claims made by economic historian, Bruce Campbell, in his ambitious book, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Campbell argues that the period from the 1260s to the 1470s should be carved out from the climatic periods before and after (respectively, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age) as its own distinct period in climate history. He identifies this as a transition, an eventually unidirectional change, not a cycle. The world in 1470 was literally a different place than it had been 200 years earlier, and only those societies that changed along with it were able to thrive. Although drawing on an extraordinary range of global climatic data, Campbell's focus is for the most part on Europe, particularly England, his own field of expertise. Campbell sees the Black Death (1346-1353) as the chief tipping point in the Great Transition, facilitated by the climatic shifts and amplified by prior decades of famine, war, and economic instability. My review argues, however, that the genetics and epidemiological evidence that Campbell marshals, or rather, the way that he marshals it, is unpersuasive in making the case that it was climate that immediately fueled the Black Death. Following several other historians of the past half century, and geneticists of the past 20 years, Campbell wishes to claim that the pandemic spread from Central Asia all the way to the Black Sea and then to the Mediterranean and beyond. The problem is the timeframe in which he wants to see this happens, which he ties to specific climatic changes. There is too great a distance to cover (4500 km, at minimum) in too short a time (less than 20 years, in the main calculus he offers). Nevertheless, Campbell's ambition, like that of Kyle Harper in another sweeping account that looks at climate change and pandemic disease as working hand in hand, should be applauded. Whereas climate history has matured considerably in the past 20 years to better advance consilient arguments, an approach to disease history grounded on genetics still needs to catch up.
- Matèries
- Història de la medicina
Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
Ressenya
- Notes
- Ressenya assaig de Campbell (2016), The Great Transition: Climate ....
- URL
- http://inference-review.com/article/black-as-death
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