Medieval Historians Taking Genomics into Account

At the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (Kzoo) last month, I couldn't help feeling that we have reached a turning point. I went to four sessions that engaged in genomics, human and/or bacterial, in some way. Granted, these are a tiny proportion of the 500+ sessions offered, but I have learned that if you...

Pregnancy, ‘coffin birth’, and the Black Death

by Michelle Ziegler The Genoese have always been central in the legend of the start of the Black Death, by their own claim, linking a siege of the Genoese at Kaffa to the spread of the epidemic in the Mediterranean. Last month the first confirmed plague graves in the region of Genoa were reported by...

Presentations on the Plague from the European Association of Archaeologists, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016

I just discovered that most of the presentations from the "Plague in Diachronic and Interdisciplinary Perspective" session of the Europan Association of Archaeologists meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on 2 September 2016 are now on YouTube.  I think I have collected them all here. Enjoy 3 hours of plague talks! Introduction-Plague in diachronic and Interdisciplinary perspective by...

Evolutionary Clues in 17th-Century Smallpox Genome

By Michelle Ziegler Smallpox is one of those diseases long believed to have an ancient pedigree, the suspected culprit of legendary epidemics. Yet, so far, smallpox hasn't made a big impression in ancient DNA surveys. If it was truly endemic throughout the Old World before 1492, so much so that it pops up in the...

Plague in 6th century Aschheim and Altenerding, Bavaria

Since I last wrote about Bavaria, the aDNA centers have been busy. With the accepted manuscript of the second new paper available this past week, its time for an update. The fourth paper on Aschheim not only confirmed the first three, but it also produced the first full genome of Yersinia pestis for the Plague...

Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague Phylogeny (II)

Monica H. Green (monica.green@asu.edu,@MonicaMedHist) is a historian of medieval medicine. An elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, she teaches both global history and the global history of health. She was the editor in 2014 of Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, the inaugural issue of a new journal, The...

Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague Phylogeny (I)

In keeping with this blog's goal to be a meeting ground for interdisciplinary discussions, I'll be hosting a series of dialogues between scholars in the humanities and sciences. If you would like to be involved in one of these dialogues, please use the contact form on the about page. On behalf of today's participants, I...

Plague News

You may have noticed that there have been several big plague papers in the last couple months. Spyrou, M. A., Tukhbatova, R. I., Feldman, M., Drath, J., Kacki, S., de Heredia, J. B., et al. (2016). Historical Y. pestis Genomes Reveal the European Black Death as the Source of Ancient and Modern Plague Pandemics. Cell...

Environment, Society and the Black Death in Sweden

Environment, Society and the Black Death: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Late Medieval Crisis in Sweden. Edited by Per Lagerås. Oxbow Books, 2016.  The Black Death is a bit of a phantom in this book. Like the human body casts of Pompeii, the Black Death is perceptible  by the void it left behind -- a void...