Historians and the Black Death

The scholarly study of the Black Death began in Europe in the nineteenth century with the development of modern history based on source-criticism and social science. However, most of the research on the Black Death has been performed in the last four decades of the twentieth century. In the first ten to fifteen years of the twenty-first century, progress was impeded by a considerable number of rash and mutually incompatible alternative theories at variance with a huge corpus of good medical and historical research. In my numbering, they are now 14 in all, which have been thoroughly discussed and shown to be untenable for various serious empirical and methodological reasons. On the other hand, the development of the microbiological study of genetic material of the past, the scientific discipline of paleobiology, has made important new contributions and also supported the results of conventional history of plague and society. Everything considered, much new real knowledge is available, and it is possible to present a far wider and more in-depth and also detailed picture than before of this greatest of all epidemic disasters and its demographic, economic, social and cultural effects. In this book, the focus is on epidemiology and demography, the pandemic’s powers and patterns of spread and demographic effects.

At first, most scholars rejected the notion that any epidemic disease could have caused an enormous and lasting reduction of European populations. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, historians discovered that the late Middle Ages was actually a period of a dramatic and lasting decline in European populations both in the countryside and in towns and cities. This was first pointed out by Sigvald Hasund, the Norwegian agrarian historian, who, in 1920, published a small book, which he, using a term found in his sources, called (in translation) On the Great Mortality. He showed that, in Norway, settlement contracted sharply, land rents plummeted, land prices were halved, and so on, and that this produced a new social scene that lasted throughout the late Middle Ages.