CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death.
The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them.
The Black Death is one of those things you learn about in any introductory study of medieval Europe, to the point that its very ubiquity, I think, makes it easy to forgot that one doesn’t necessarily understand the impact it had on the granular level on the common people living in Europe, who despite living out very different lives in very different circumstances have the same essential kind of humanity that has belonged to humans throughout the ages.
I thought Kelly did an excellent job of breaking down and individualizing this colossal topic. After an few introductory chapters on the disease and its origins, we ride its coattails as it sweeps down first on the besieged port city of Caffa, then sails upon dark ships to Italy, France, and beyond. Everywhere Kelly draws upon contemporary writings – legal documents, religious instruction, ‘plague chronicles,’ and more to resurrect what your average citizen felt and thought and experienced as disease overcame city after city.
It was especially interesting to be listening to this book, written long before the COVID-19 pandemic, and compare and contrast our own reactions with those of the medieval Europeans to our own brand new disease. The more of this book you read the more obvious it becomes that we have really always been the same as ever.
I did think the latter portion of the book, moving into England and beyond, flagged a little, maybe because Kelly did not have the same wealth of personal writings to draw upon. For whatever reason the plague started to feel more distant by then.