In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

Rating:
Summary: A Concise Look at How the Black Death Changed History...
Review:
Norman Cantor is one of the pre-imminent historians of the Middle Ages and his "The Civilization of the Middle Ages" is a classic. The small volume that I'm summarizing here is a concise history of a pivotal event of the Middle Ages, the Black Death, which killed some forty percent of Europe's population. Cantor's book is based on accounts from the Middle Ages as well as recent scientific scholarship that that illuminates the probable causes of the epidemic and its spread. In this unusual narrative history, the author introduces individual characters that help to humanize the victims of the disease and he then shows the effect of the Black Death on every aspect of European history. Cantor works backward, tracing the effects of pandemics on earlier epochs, summarizing the theory that the demise of Classical Greece and Rome and the Holy Roman Empire was hastened by disease.


Rating:
Summary: Good for What it Is - Fun Read
Review: "In the Wake of the Plague" reads like a collection of lectures; my guess is that it was assembled from various essays and lectures that Cantor had written over time.

Each chapter reads like and independent essay, and resultantly there is quite a bit of repetition and a lack of chronology. The writing style is breezy. The book can either be seen as easy to read due to the conversational prose, or hard to read due to its lack of a linear timeline and assumption of a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the reader.

I enjoyed this book very much because I found it to be a provocative series of pieces from a knowledgeable author. Many of the essays felt like counterfactual arguments - "What if the plague had not occurred - how would it have affected women?" "What if the plague had not occurred - how would it have affected the legal system?" "What if the plague had not occurred - how would it have affected _____(fill in the blank - Jews, finance, politics, scholarship, land ownership . . .)" At times I found the analysis absurdly reductionist as in the discussions of land ownership, law or scholarship. At other times I found the analysis to be so provocative as to be embarassed for the author, as in the discussion of the possibility of the plague being started by something from outer space. Overall I felt as though (I too bought it in the airport) I were being accompanied on the plane flight by a gifted raconteur with great knowledge and fascinating ideas who at times bordered on the edge of being a crackpot.

I enjoyed it. If you are interested in the middle ages, the interplay between biology and history, or just love to read good essays, I think you will too. If you are looking for a structured historical narrative, solid scholarship (Cantor is a scholar but it is exhibited only tangentially in this book) or a detailed account of the plague or the middle ages, this isn't the book.

Rating:
Summary: a waste of time and misleading, read Tuchman instead
Review: As a European history teacher, I hoped that I would get some tidbits from this for my class and for my own edification. I found neither. I have trouble imagining that this writer is actually a Medieval scholar. I suspect he is suffering from Alzheimers. He has the reverence for facts of Ronald Reagan, among other dopey innacuracies: the end of the Roman empire is put two centuries late, the Romans he says had been fending off the Arabs for millennia (even though the Roman empire existed for less than one millennia), the plague came from Africa-it clearly came from East Asia. Further the writing style is terrible. It is nearly unreadable. There is constant repetition, bizarre and awkward phrases "biomedical disaster" and no structure. Each chapter wanders around without a thesis, repeats earlier chapters and makes pathetic attempts to tie in to recent events. There are also a huge number of ridiculous theories (plague was from outer space, without the plague the scientific revolution would have come centuries earlier, etc.) which Cantor badly explains and then doesn't critically evaluate. They might be true, he muses, without looking at any facts.
I suspect that this was cobbled together from hastily written lecture notes for an introductory history class for brain dead undergraduates without the editing that it desperately needs. Don't waste your time on this, there is almost nothing to learn here.
Instead read Barbara Tuchman's long, but fully researched and wonderfully detailed book: A Distant Mirror about the 14th century. It has a very powerful chapter on the plague and gives a real sense of Medieval life.

Rating:
Summary: a waste of time and misleading, read Tuchman instead
Review: As a European history teacher, I hoped that I would get some tidbits from this for my class and for my own edification. I found neither. I have trouble imagining that this writer is actually a Medieval scholar. I suspect he is suffering from Alzheimers. He has the reverence for facts of Ronald Reagan, among other dopey innacuracies: the end of the Roman empire is put two centuries late, the Romans he says had been fending off the Arabs for millennia (even though the Roman empire existed for less than one millennia), the plague came from Africa-it clearly came from East Asia. Further the writing style is terrible. It is nearly unreadable. There is constant repetition, bizarre and awkward phrases "biomedical disaster" and no structure. Each chapter wanders around without a thesis, repeats earlier chapters and makes pathetic attempts to tie in to recent events. There are also a huge number of ridiculous theories (plague was from outer space, without the plague the scientific revolution would have come centuries earlier, etc.) which Cantor badly explains and then doesn't critically evaluate. They might be true, he muses, without looking at any facts.
I suspect that this was cobbled together from hastily written lecture notes for an introductory history class for brain dead undergraduates without the editing that it desperately needs. Don't waste your time on this, there is almost nothing to learn here.
Instead read Barbara Tuchman's long, but fully researched and wonderfully detailed book: A Distant Mirror about the 14th century. It has a very powerful chapter on the plague and gives a real sense of Medieval life.

Rating:
Summary: Avoid this like the plague...
Review: Cantor strikes a populist direction with this book. He affects a breezy writing style (one can easily imagine much of his writing as a spoken, off-the-cuff lecture punctuated by more-or-less amusing asides, some of which totally derail his train of thought), the book is short (only 220 pages of text) and there is not a single footnote. The obvious comparison in terms of subject matter is to Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Tuchman made a best seller from her remarkable approach in spite of her scholarly writing-style. Cantor's book lacks that sophistication of approach, and is further marred, as other reviewers have already noted, by too much repetition, too many asides, too much unsupported speculation, too many inconsistencies, and too many factual errors. There is some merit to the book, but its flaws far outweigh its worth.

Cantor at his best cites an interesting theory: that the Black Death was not a single disease, but two or more--not bubonic plague alone, but also some cattle-borne disease such as a particularly virulent form of anthrax. Supporting this theory are the Black Death's infestation of Iceland, an isolated island not known to have rats until the 17th Century, the often extremely rapid course of the disease--faster than that of bubonic plague; the lack of typical bubonic plague symptoms in many victims; the evidence that cattle were ravished by the Black Death; and the continued virulence of the plague in winter months when flea hosts would not normally live. The theory is not Cantor's own, but he has researched and supported it in convincing fashion. Less adequate is Cantor's chapter "Heritage of the African Rifts", which discusses the three pandemics of smallpox, gonorrhea, and plague and places their origin in "the great mortality chute from East Africa. Certainly that is where the bubonic plague came from after A.D. 500." But in his bibliography Cantor cites William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and says, contradicting his own earlier statement written with such certainty, "McNeill thought the Mongols, their migrations and conquests, were a key to plague history; there may be something in that."

Also of interest, but clearly quirky, was Cantor's chapter on various speculations on the true cause of the Black Death. "Serpents and Cosmic Dust" covers alternative explanations for the "biomedical catastrophe" from the medieval to the present, focusing on two suggestions: the first, that snakes were the carriers; the second, that plague came from outer space. Cantor is kind, although not entirely enthusiastic, about these speculations: at one point he says "It is just possible that medieval writers who placed the origins of the Black Death in serpents dispensing plague as they swam up rivers were on to something." Unfortunately, the only "evidence" he offers is that another historian on an unrelated issue once took medieval writers at their word in the face of academic thought and has since been vindicated. The argument in favor of the cosmic dust theory is basically that it was proposed by eminent astrophysicist Fred Hoyle--what is not mentioned is Hoyle's second career as a well-known science fiction writer. Hoyle's is a fascinating speculation, which only the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence can currently support.

Cantor mentions one fascinating fact in this chapter that needed to be explored much further: plague was not widespread in Poland and Bohemia. This has been explained "by the rats' avoidance of these areas due to the unavailability of food the rodents found palatable." This seems unlikely --elsewhere Cantor points out the relative agricultural wealth of Poland and the Ukraine. Could Polish grain really be considerably different than Western European grain--and what of the anthrax theory, which would have the disease unaffected by the rodent's diet?

Socio-cultural differences between Poland and Bohemia and the rest of Europe would make an ideal testing ground for those theories concerning the effect the Black Death had on society, the arts, and religion. But rather than do any original research comparing plague-ridden and plague-free areas, Cantor merely launches into various criticisms of his colleagues' work in his final chapter, "Aftermath". Cantor examines these theories and subjects them to a much less forgiving critique than the far wilder speculations mentioned previously. Some of these attacks are odd indeed, such as critiquing a book published in 1919! This is the most poorly written and argued part of the entire book, and honestly I cannot tell to what conclusion Cantor comes-whether the Black Death did or did not have any profound effect beyond killing off certain talented individuals.

Finally, the outright errors. Rather than repeat those caught by other reviewers, I'll discuss the extraordinary apparent claim of time-travel. Cantor recounts the story of the le Strange/Talbot family. Richard Talbot inherited the la Strange estate from the dowager Mary upon her "dying in 1396." (Whether this was a plague-related death Cantor apparently deems unimportant.) Later in the chapter we are told "Richard Talbot, newly enriched by the le Strange fortune, got his father out of debtor's prison and the old soldier died of the plague in 1387 in Spain..." How could Richard have paid his father's debts with money he wouldn't receive for nine more years? I cannot account for the chronology of events without either contemplating a typographical error, a rift in the space-time continuum, or a mis-informed or deeply confused author. Hopefully it is the former, and Mary died ten years earlier than Cantor reports; but I am left with the discomforting concern that the dates are correct and Cantor simply speculated on Talbot's source of funds. Unfortunately this is not an isolated error.

While Cantor's book is more up-to-date than Barbara Tuchman's is, I can't recommend it, even as a supplement. It is too deeply flawed on too many levels. I'm left to wonder if some horrible computer virus didn't work its way through the manuscript, decimating the writing and killing at least 40% of the ultimate value of the book. As Cantor says, "It is just possible."

Rating:
Summary: Medieval-like writing
Review: Dr. Cantor is a medievalist, and writes in the style of his subjects: very rambling, with a tendency to ramify tediously so he can talk at length about what he finds interesting, whether or not it is relevant. Some good information, some mistakes even a non-scholar reader like me could spot. Not a lot about the plague. Some peculiar theories. What seems to me a misapplication of 20th-century terminology to 14th-century groups (for instance, what sounds like raiders or harriers, he calls terrorists).

Rating:
Summary: Easy read, if somewhat jumbled
Review: I bought this book at the airport in Boston and found it appropriate as an "airport book." On a late night flight, it was entertaining but not intense. Nor was it well organized. The end of the book abruptly stops with comments about Chaucer rather than a summing up of the main thesis. One gets the impression of an erudite academician, late in life, with lots to say but very little energy to say it in an organized way. Some of the errors are obvious, even to someone with only surface knowledge of the period. For example, he states somewhere in the book that Constantinople fell in the 14th century rather than in 1453. But for all that .. it is a quick read and can be considered as something like a "bathroom reader" -- full of interesting tid bits but without much of a unifying thread. His earlier books were much better organized. Maybe he just needs to take a vacation. I'd recommend it as a airplane or beach book (aka "history lite").

Rating:
Summary: Some explanations on the Black Plague.
Review: I didn't think this was a great book but it did give me some knowledge of how terrible the Black Plague and the terrible effects on Europe and Asia. It really decimated the populations of Western Europe, almost to the point where civilization was at stake. Cantor describes it as the modern day example of the atom bomb. Cantor does some theorizing about the origin and the fact that the plague may have also been anthrax, and not the plague spread by rats. He also theorizes what might have happened if the plague had not been. Society and civilization may have developed faster, rather than recover from the population loss.
This is an OK read, and I learned something from Cantor's writings. I am surprised others have rated this book so low, because it did give a side of the Black Plague that is rarely written about.

Rating:
Summary: The Black Death & the World it Made
Review: I picked this up at the airport over Christmas and I was very disapointed. This read very informally with each chapter feeling independent of the next (I could not believe the amount of repetition of facts and tidbits). The scholarship felt shoddy and unsupported (zero footnotes). The only new information that felt worth coming away with was the second chapter (Rodents and Cattle) which speculates that bubonic plague was not the only epidemic happening around 1340 but that there was also an outbreak of Anthrax effecting the cattle. Read the second chapter and leave the rest.

Rating:
Summary: A Surfeit of Plagues
Review: Norman Cantor has written a slim, un-footnoted book about an interesting and timely topic -- plague. His blurb-writers describe IN THE WAKE OF THE PLAGUE as "lively" and "easy to read", while I would call the book's style breezy and diffuse. At one point Cantor writes that the Ottoman Turks finally captured Constantinople "...on their way to Kosovo". And why does the reader need to know that Johan Huizinga wrote his masterwork, THE AUTUMN OF THE MIDDLE AGES, "after his department head reminded him it was publish or perish time."? There are some odd phrases, factual mistakes and numerous repetitions that careful editing should have removed. On the positive side is Cantor's engaging technique of describing the effect of the Black Death on specific individuals and families. Another value of the book is that it provides the reader with an up-to-date survey of historical theories about the Black Death, in particular, and pandemics in general. For example, I was not aware that there is current thought that the Black Death was the combined result of an outbreak of bubonic plague and anthrax.

In addition to describing the effects of the Black Death on European society, Cantor seems to be enunciating a biomedical theory of history in this book. He suggests that earlier outbreaks of plague (probably smallpox and/or gonorrhea) played the same pivotal role in the decline of the Roman Empire that he assigns to the Black Death's effect on the medieval Plantagenet empire. He concludes that those events should provide cautionary examples to citizens of the American empire.

An example of factual errors is Cantor's placing the village of Saint Julien "south of Bordeaux" when, in fact, it is northwest. In the twisted phrase department, he writes about mankind's migration "...up the Nile to the Mediterranean" and pandemics traveling "...up the chute of the Nile." Repetitions: Cantor tells the reader at least three times that Richard II was a weak ruler who probably lost his crown because he was gay. Richard's sexual orientation has no relevance to the Black Death, so why harp on it? In fact, the emphasis on it tends to undermine Cantor's claim that plague was the primary factor in the loss of the Plantagenet's continental provinces.