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(228 reviews)
Author: Norman F. Cantor
ISBN : 0684857359
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Format: PDF
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Much of what we know about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the final, awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a haze of myths.
Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death afresh, as a gripping, intimate narrative.
"In the Wake of the Plague" presents a microcosmic view of the Plague in England (and on the continent), telling the stories of the men and women of the fourteenth century, from peasant to priest, and from merchant to king. Cantor introduces a fascinating cast of characters. We meet, among others, fifteen-year-old Princess Joan of England, on her way to Spain to marry a Castilian prince; Thomas of Birmingham, abbot of Halesowen, responsible for his abbey as a CEO is for his business in a desperate time; and the once-prominent landowner John le Strange, who sees the Black Death tear away his family's lands and then its very name as it washes, unchecked, over Europe in wave after wave.
Cantor argues that despite the devastation that made the Plague so terrifying, the disease that killed more than 40 percent of Europe's population had some beneficial results. The often literal demise of the old order meant that new, more scientific thinking increasingly prevailed where church dogma had once reigned supreme. In effect, the Black Deathheralded an intellectual revolution. There was also an explosion of art: tapestries became popular as window protection against the supposedly airborne virus, and a great number of painters responded to the Plague. Finally, the Black Death marked an economic sea change: the onset of what Cantor refers to as turbocapitalism; the peasants who survived the Plague thrived, creating Europe's first class of independent farmers.
Here are those stories and others, in a tale of triumph coming out of the darkest horror, wrapped up in a scientific mystery that persists, in part, to this day. Cantor's portrait of the Black Death's world is pro-vocative and captivating. Not since Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" have medieval men and women been brought so vividly to life. The greatest popularizer of the Middle Ages has written the period's most fascinating narrative.
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- Hardcover: 245 pages
- Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (April 10, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0684857359
- ISBN-13: 978-0684857350
- Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
Free Download In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
I have never understood why Norman Cantor seems to think the public only wants the "movie version" of history instead of the real thing. But the movie version -- including outdated ideas, sensational assertions and gross misunderstandings -- is what this is. After reading this book -- which, fortunately, I didn't pay full price for -- I am happy to see from the reviews posted here that others have spotted its many flaws.
Quite a few people who come to this book WITHOUT much background in medieval history or medicine find it fascinating, and feel they have learned a lot about history from it -- though admittedly it's also rambling, repetitious, VERY poorly edited and sometimes difficult to keep track of. (I'll second all those criticisms but won't address them here.)
On the other hand, people who actually KNOW something about biology, anthropology, genetics, epidemiology, demographics or material culture will be brought up short by Cantor's sloppy thinking and downright inexcusable ignorance.
One reviewer comments, "Cantor's research for this tome must have been incredibly extensive, since he provides excruciating details for every topic..." But in fact, it's those very fascinating details that are often wrong. Just about any time I found myself saying "Wow, I never knew THAT," it turned out later that Cantor was wrong. For instance, he clearly didn't even bother to verify his facts on the old "Ring Around the Rosy" legend -- check it out on the Urban Legends Reference Pages; the song seems to hve come into existence in the 1880s.
As for demographics, he confuses the statistics on life expectancy badly, saying that a modern actuary would have given the 15-year-old Princess Joan "just about ten years to live", based on an *average* life expectancy of 25.
This book reads like it was written on a deadline without any serious research. Don't be intimidated by the 230 pages. The large font and small pages disguise the fact that it is little more than a brochure. In the early pages the reader gets hints that it will be a wide-ranging review of causes and consequences of the great European plague of 1348. Suggestions that the labor shortage created when 40% of the population perished led to the destruction of ossified social institutions and paved the way for the Renaissance while fundamentally changing land ownership patterns and the Catholic church. Now that would have been an interesting book.Unfortunately, it's not this book. The next chapter is little more than an ad-libbed 33-page anti-royalty sermon. The English Princess Joan dies of plague in Bordeaux on her way to Spain. The book's peculiar approach to this event is not to separate and examine the historical strands of consequence so much as to provide an outlet for a strange loathing for medieval nobility. "Joan was a top-drawer white girl, a European princess"; "Most kings filled their roles weakly and uneasily, like third-rate actors playing Hamlet on road circuit in the boondocks"; "Three flunkies of the royal household were dispatched to purvey (that is, extort) food from Devon". Two pages describing Joan's baggage and another four on chapels that English nobles built for themselves. No depth, just a silly down-with-the-crown sensibility while discussing nothing but a string of English kings, and even then without drawing any connections to the plague.
Next come long bios of two Oxford intellectuals, both interesting fellows, but there is no serious analysis of consequences, just that they were smart and they died of the same disease.