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...

Rivers in European Plague Outbreak Patterns, 1347-1760

by Michelle Ziegler The era of big data is coming to historic epidemiology. A new study published this month in Scientific Reports took a database of 5559 European outbreak reports (81.9% from UK, France, and Germany) between 1347 and 1760 to analyze the role of rivers in the incidence and spread of plague. Their hypothesis...

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...

Human Parasites of the Roman Empire

Last week photos of Roman toilets were splashed across the web breaking the news that the Romans were not a healthy as most people seem to have assumed. As with many public health interventions, the real value of a sanitation system is out of view (and out of mind) to most people. Its not the...

Contagion and Pestilence in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies

Before Isidore of Seville became the patron saint of the internet, he was known for over a thousand years as a font of knowledge.  Isidore was not an innovator; he was a master of synthesis. It is through Isidore that we have an orderly account of the learned knowledge of the Late Roman world.  He...

Reading in July

  As I start working on my book project, I'm going to have less time to develop blog posts, so I thought I would share what I'm reading with you each month. This will also give me an incentive to keep blogging and reading! I'll list the books I've read and the papers that I...

On Giant’s Shoulders #66: Contagious History!

Welcome to the 66th edition of On Giant's Shoulders, the blog carnival for the history of science, medicine and technology! I wish I could pull a bunch of holiday posts out of Santa's bag, but the blogosphere does not appear to be in the festive mood yet. An anniversary and commemoration mood seems to be...

Health and Healing Sessions at Kalamazoo 2012

Regular readers might remember that last fall I was regularly posting and tweeting a call for papers for a session on health and healing in early medieval Europe for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2012. The schedule for the Congress is now out so I can tell everyone all about it....