Plague Journal Club: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World

No reading required! We will be watching a video lecture by Bruce M.S. Campbell, author of "The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World," where he discusses how changes in climate, the economy, and warfare contributed to the onset and severity of plague epidemics in Medieval Europe.

Lecture

Lecture 4- Disease intervenes: The Black Death and the 'Great Transition' to an alternative socio-ecological equilibrium

http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/podcast-campbell.html

 

Book

"The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Soceity in the Late-Medieval World." (2016) 

Bruce M.S. Campbell

ISBN: 9780521144438

Description

In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition', Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy.

Published Sep. 1, 2016 5:15 PM - Last modified Sep. 1, 2016 5:15 PM