Disease and Discrimination in Colonial Atlantic America

Reviewed by Michelle Ziegler Dale Hutchinson. Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America. University of Florida Press, 2016. $85 Dale Hutchinson's latest book fits into a recent trend of a more critical analysis of the role disease played in the demographic collapse of Native Americans in the Colonial period. After spending most of...

CFP: Contagions sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Studies 2018

by Michelle Ziegler Contagions: The Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies has been given the opportunity of organizing three sessions at next year's International Congress for Medieval Studies. This is the equivalent of a full day at the Congress. The Congress will be held from May 10 to May 13, 2018, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo...

Roundtable on Campbell’s Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World

by Michelle Ziegler Bruce Campbell. The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World. Cambridge University Press, 2016. When I first learned that Bruce Campbell was working on this book, I wondered if it would be the first grand synthesis of the new paradigm. Although there have been some very good regional...

Looking back on the autumn

This fall was quite the chaotic jumble -- not all bad. One project successfully completed. A door closed but I think another better one may be opening. Somehow in the midst of all this I managed to do a little reading, so here is what that stood out for the fall (and early winter). My...

A Summer in review

  Its been a long and stressful summer. Projects are moving along and there should be more news to share on one of those projects in the next couple months. Other projects set in motion this summer may take a year or more to run their course. So the articles I'm sharing below are just...

What’s in a name?

The post-Roman centuries in Europe have a bit of an identity crisis. If we defined the period from when the Western Emperor was abolished in 480 to the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day 800 AD, what would you call it? At times I've used all of these names, and a...

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...

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...