Black Death

Rating:
Summary: A Compelling Book
Review: An excellent essay on the terrible and far reaching effects of the Black Plague on Medieval Europe. With staggering figures, it truly conveys the despondency that Dark Ages Europe fell into with the coming of this Plague from "God". Well researched, but not overwhelming with footnotes, and still candid enough to be an enjoyable read. I recommend it for those truly curious about what it must have been like to been in the path of the Black Death.

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: For a deep look into the social aspects of the bubonic plague
of the 14th century, this book is it. This is not a medical treastise on the plague - there are enough books on the science
of the disease. I wanted to explore the social ramifications
of this disease and compare it with the Flu epidenmic of 1918,
and this book does explore how the black death affected people in the 14th century socially and economically. Good book.

Rating:
Summary: Okay book on the Black Death with Technical Emphasis
Review: I bought this book after reading several others on the period because a friend with a background in medieval history said this is widely considered "the book" on the black death. While it's definitely better than some of the other ones out there, it's by no means the best.

The book starts out strongly, with descriptions of what the plague is and some general observations on the state of life in Europe during the early 14th century. Ziegler does an excellent job of describing the physical symptoms and characteristics of the plague and the sources for what we do and don't know about the pandemic that would later come to be known as the black death and which struck Europe from 1348-1350 with diastrous results. He describes the effects of the plague in Italy, France and Germany, before moving on to England, the country from which we have the most surviving contemporary accounts and archeological evidence. Ziegler does a good job of describing the leading theories of the day, medical practices, hygiene, and the social effects of the black death, including the persecution of the jews and the religious movement of the flagellents.

When the book turns to England, however, it begins to fall apart. I should start out by saying that I am impressed with the amount of work Ziegler has done to try to analyze the actual number of deaths during the pandemic. As Ziegler points out, contemporary accounts wildly overstated or overestimated numbers (a common problem with medieval accounts generally), in some cases, stating numbers of deaths that exceeded the total population of the city about which the contemporary chronicler was writing. He presents evidence of known numbers that might be useful in calculating the number of dead, e.g., number of clerical benefices filled during the period, deaths recorded in the manorial rolls, etc., and various arguments that have been made for extrapolating numbers of deaths in the population at large from what is known. As he traces the plague's path through England, however, he repeats this analysis for every major city and some minor ones as well. Unless you are specifically interested in how many people died in York versus how many died in Bath, etc., the repitition becomes tiresome, and even if you are looking for the effect of plague on a particular region, not all are covered.

I have to agree with the other reviewers that the fictional chapter on two imaginary villages is a low point in the book. Ziegler, himself, must have realized how dry his account was getting and tried to impart the horror of the plague on the people who lived through it by creating these fictional places and giving us a story about what the inhabitants might have gone through. The problem is that Ziegler just doesn't write fiction very well. In any event, he didn't need to write it as fiction, he could have written supposition about the people who really lived through it, and it would have carried the same impact. He finishes up with a summary of the remainder of the 14th century and how the plague affected the economy and social structure of Europe, including its contribution to the peasant's revolt of 1381 in England, and whether the plague led to the downfall of the feudal system.

A much more moving and well-written account of the black death can be found in a chapter of Barbara Tuchman's book "The Calamitous Fourteenth Century," which contains bascially the same information as this book, including a significant number of the same first-hand quotations. You really feel the human impact of the plague after reading Tuchman. With Ziedler, however, you get a great deal of information about the black death, including a detailed analysis of the plague's origin and routes into the various countries. Just be prepared for a read that gets increasingly dryer and harder to stay with. You will, however, walk away with a lot of knowledge about the black death, so this book definitely fulfills its purpose, even it doesn't do it as elegantly or movingly as one might like.

Rating:
Summary: The Plague of readability
Review: I have no doubt that this book was originally outlined as a historical thesis, as its general readability [outside of the final chapters] is very poor. Yes, there is factual data amongst the 288 pages, and it does manage to paint a picture of what occurred in Europe at the time, although it is seemingly repetitive. One does not really get a sense of the disastrous effects of the Black Death upon society until the final chapter, and even then the true harm is left to the reader to imagine.
If the point of this book was just to look at the historical event from a statistical/scientific point of view, then this book might have been abridged to an extended magazine article.
Interesting, but a bit too pedantic.

Rating:
Summary: A beneficial catastrophy
Review: Philip Ziegler in this edition of The Black Death tries to give a full picture of the Plague that reached Europe in 1338 to stay there till the Great Plague of London in 1665. He compiles all information he can on the subject and confronts all these contradictory elements and tries to give a fair, balanced, and honest picture. Difficult. This plague probably cost Europe between 12.5% and 70% of its population according to the places, regions and population density, hygiene,etc. Yet the plague was not such a scourge after all. After two or three centuries of steady and great expansion of rural Europe due to the first agricultural revolution (the use of animals to till the land) and that caused a tremendous demographic expansion, the situation changed at the end of the 13th century. Overpopulation (two much labor for the amount of work available, and two many people for the avaialble resources of the time), famines here and there, undernourishment and malnutrition, all that caused the development of « heresies », that is to say standard religious orders (like the Franciscans) or religious inspired groups that advocated the poverty of Christ, hence the poverty of the church, hence a more equalitarian society and a better sharing of the resources. This led to dire crusades and the Inquisition that became a ruthless and criminal tool of the church to impose its full control on the minds of people. It also went along with the development of an apocalyptic vision of the world, the famous coming of doomsday and of the Antichrist. The plague (pneumonic, bubonic and septicaemic) was a way to reduce pressure and the great reserves in human resources explain the fact that recovery was rapid. But it also proved the apocalyptic vision wrong, because the world did not come to an end. It produced a new approach to religion, more sincere, more contemplative, but definitely no longer based on the coming of the Antichrist. They started wanting to go back to the real text, to the Bible, since all the predicators were wrong, and since priests or cardinals were just punished the same way as simple sinners. What's more the Sodom and Gomorrah myth did not stand this time : the whole population was not destroyed, but only a portion of it. The conequences were far reaching in other fields. It gave serfs and villeins a better bargaining power, more freedom and mobility. It caused increased salaries and more money instead of edibles or other goods. It moved society towards a more monetary hence commercial society. In the countryside it reduced the power of landowners. It also decimated some perambulating professions, especially craftsman, builders, stone workers, etc, and it deprived the great wave of church building that followed of their best artists, and thus it gave rise to what we call the Perpendicular style, simpler, less ornate and purer. The geometry is the same, but the looks are more austere. The function is clearer : to elevate the faithful towards the light of God, towards the light of the Truth. New forms of art also developed under the influence of the Avignon Popes : a gregorian polyphony, new forms like Motets, etc, all things that are attached to the Italian Renaissance, and yet that developed greatly in the 13th and especially 14th centuries in France. This book will not give you a final knowledge of that greatly neglected historical period, but it will definitely enrich your mind with a lot of disquieting ideas. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris universities II and IX.

Rating:
Summary: solid academic analysis
Review: The Black Death is a fairly academic book that seeks to give a comprehensive overview of the plague that ravaged Europe around 1348 (the book only briefly refers to other epedemics that also occurred during the rest of the 14th century). Zeigler points out in his 1997 preface (the book originally being written in 1969) that the book contains "virtually no original research." His goal was to organize, analyze, and present all the various research work, studies, and articles on the Black Death into one complete volume, since apparently there existed no such work at the time.

For the general reader (meaning somebody who, like me, is not a historian or researching to Black Death; presumably such people already know of this book and would not be interested in my review of it), the book is a bit on the dry academic side, but it is still a quite enjoyable read. Zeigler starts with the origins of the disease, and traces it through Italy, France, Spain, England, and the rest of Europe. There is a heavy emphasis on England, which gets about as much space in the book as the rest of Europe combined, apparently because there is much more surviving evidence and information about the plague from England than anywhere else. The result is that the middle of the book seems to bog down in monotonous details about number of deaths in individual towns, counties, etc. that are probably of little interest to most readers.

But there is much more to enjoy. In my case, I know little about the Middle Ages beyond what I learned in grade school; thus I greatly enjoyed the sections on things such as the state of medical knowledge, the Flagellants, the persecution of the Jews, hygeine conditions in London, and other asides that were relevant to the situation at hand.

The last 50 or so pages are also quite interesting, in which Zeigler discusses debate among historians over such issues as the total population of Europe at the time, the death toll from the plague, and the social, economic, agriculture, artistic, and religious effects of the plague, especially in the 50 years afterwards. Again, for some readers, it may seem a dry listing of numbers and facts. But it also shows exactly how historians work to piece together a complete picture of history based on the limited evidence available, and how such evidence can be interpreted in different ways. Zeigler does not put forth any new theories himself, but is willing to give cite the ideas of opposed historians in an effort to show a balanced picture and possibly draw some conclusions from them. In some cases where it is simply impossible for us to truly ever know the real answer (such as exactly what portion of the population died in the plague) Zeigler is willing to hazard some guesses, but also to admit that we really don't know.

There is one major flaw: a 30-page chapter in the book in which Zeigler invents a fictional historical village and narrates the arrival of the plague. In his preface, Zeigler says that he received a lot of criticism for this chapter from those who claimed it had no place in scholarly writing. Zeigler defends the chapter, saying that "statistics and facts alone, however striking, could noconvey the horror that afflicted Europe in the mid-fourteenth century." I agree with him on this point, and I thought the chapter was a good idea, until I actually read it. In my opinion, his fictional writing is so bland and devoid of emotion, that he failed in his attempt to give life to the horrors of the plague and their effect on the average man.

Overall though, I definitely recommend this book to anybody with an interest in European history.

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive History of the Black Death!
Review: This book was actually one of the sources I used for a history paper which I submitted to my grade eleven history teacher. I was amazed at how Mr. Ziegler presents his material. The book is very well written and keeps you in line with all events described. The Black Death truly was the worst natural and man-made disaster in history. Claiming approx. a third of Europe, it led to great changes in Europe itself and left a mark in the people themselves. Ziegler also describes the Black Death from country to country, and the bulk of the book is devoted to England. I have noticed that almost all historians of Medieval Europe have used Ziegler's book (first published in 1969), and I can now see why! If there is one book on the Black Death that you want to read, let it be this one!

Rating:
Summary: The best.
Review: This is simply the best account of the Black Death ever written. It manages to be simultaneously scholarly and readable, while enscapulating a rather amorphous subject and constantly amusing and engaging the reader.

Rating:
Summary: The best.
Review: This is simply the best account of the Black Death ever written. It manages to be simultaneously scholarly and readable, while enscapulating a rather amorphous subject and constantly amusing and engaging the reader.

Rating:
Summary: Good overview of the period
Review: This is the first book on the Black Death I read. From what I understand it is one of the first to be published. It is a good overview of the progression of the Black Death in Europe, starting in Italy and working up to England. As one other reviewer has said this is a popularized book: there is no new research done. He pretty much just follows the course the Black Death went throughout Europe. The story of the village at the end was interesting, and I gives the reader a peek into how a typical farmer/villager would react and live thorough the horror. Overall I would recommend this book for someone interested in the Black Death but doesn't really care about the science behind the spread.