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 can string together so many sessions on any topic related to your work, it’s a really good Congress.
The tone was set in the very first session when Philip Slavin brought up human epigenetics in his discussion of 14th-century famine. This was followed the next day with three sessions on the Black Death and 14th-century crisis. The two Contagions society sessions went very well. Carenza Lewis talked about her ceramics landscape survey that showed how deep the 14th-century demographic loss actually was. Fabian Crespo introduced the audience to the human immune landscape and how it can be fruitfully approached (including by epigenetics). I will post on the roundtable on Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition later this summer. The third plague session, Before and After 1348, organized by Monica Green focused on Asia and generated a vigorous discussion. I also attended a fifth session that focused on more traditional biological anthropology, ie. mostly osteology.
This turn hasn’t come all of a sudden. Historians began paying more attention to bacterial genomics a little over a decade ago when plague aDNA first hit the news. Michael McCormick, Lester Little, and Monica Green have all been instrumental in bringing science to the attention of historians. Three edited volumes stand out for putting genomics in front of historians: Lester Little’s Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750 (2007), Linda Clark and Carol Rawcliffe’s Society in the Age of Plague (2013), and Monica Green’s Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death* (2015).
On the other hand, scientists have also edited collections of papers that should make the science more accessible to historians. Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt have edited two volumes, Paleomicrobiology (2008) and Paleomicrobiology of Humans (2017). Ruifu Yang and Andrey Anisimov edited a more technical volume, Yersinia pestis: Retrospective and Perspective (2016) that should summarize the state of the science (as of 2016) for more advanced readers in the humanities.
Of the monographs, the historian’s usual primary venue, books addressing genomics or using genomics as a springboard are limited. With at least three appearing in 2016 by Nükhet Varlik, Ole Benedictow, and Bruce Campbell, this should change soon. At this point, I should mention that genomics is already becoming useful to historians of other diseases, especially leprosy and tuberculosis. Historians are also becoming reinvigorated to provide context for plague and other diseases that may be of interest to geneticists and biological anthropologists. Varlik’s edited collected Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017) is the most recent to provide context for a variety of diseases in an understudied area.
*Green’s volume was first published as a double inaugural issue of the journal The Medieval Globe and then published as a hardback book by ARC Medieval Press.
