After the Black Death: Recurrent Outbreaks of Plague in the Medieval World

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Medieval Association for Rural Studies (MARS)

Organizer Name

Philip Slavin

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Stirling

Presider Name

Lee Mordechai

Presider Affiliation

Univ. of Notre Dame

Paper Title 1

Dying on the Road: Rural Refugees of the Second Plague Pandemic in Egypt: A New Theory of Urban Plague Mortality

Presenter 1 Name

Stuart Borsch

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Assumption College

Paper Title 2

Plague's Persistence in Europe during the Second Pandemic as Revealed through Genomic Evidence

Presenter 2 Name

Kirsten I. Bos

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Max Planck Institute, Jena

Paper Title 3

Looking for European Foci of Plague, as Revealed through Textual and (Palaeo-)Environmental Data

Presenter 3 Name

Philip Slavin

Start Date

9-5-2019 3:30 PM

Session Location

Bernhard 208

Description

The topic of the 2019 MARS session, entitled After the Black Death: Recurrent Outbreaks of Plague in the Medieval World, is related to the most notorious killer of humans – bubonic plague. It will be dealing with the recurrent waves of the plague in the late medieval period. Just as the first session, this session, too, will aim to fill some important historiographical and intellectual lacunae related to the history of pandemic disease in the medieval world. As of today, the lion’s share of studies of the late-medieval plague have focused on its first and most infamous wave: the Black Death of 1346-53; yet, there are virtually no studied on its subsequent waves. The session will address this gap, by looking on the nature, scale, timing and geography of the recurrent outbreaks, and their impact on the demography, economy and society of various regions in 14^th- and 15^th-century Eurasia. In addition, it will stress the importance of trans-disciplinary collaboration with palaeo-geneticists and epidemiologists, to advance the shared knowledge of the human past. Philip Slavin