THE BLACK DEATH AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST By David Herlihy Edited by Samuel K. Cohn Jr. Harvard University Press. 117 pp.

A Historian Puts the Bubonic Plague in Perspective

Though the lectures were written for scholars, they are entirely accesible to the lay reader. Some of Herlihy's judgements may be at issue among historians - Cohn takes respectful exception to some in his introduction - but that should be of little consequence to those who are more interested in the broad matters under discussion here. As both Herlihy and Cohn pointed out, the Black Death is not merely a phrase vaguely recalled from the textbooks of one's youth; it reminds us that AIDS and other contemporary illnesses, some of which have reached plaguelike dimensions, are not freakish modern phenomena but pieces in a larger historical pattern.

Cohn believes that Herlihy was inspired to reexamine the Black Death because of AIDS: "The origins of AIDS, as with the plague of 1348, remain . . . mysterious. AIDS too appears to have arisen ex-nihilo and - despite the propaganda of religious and homophobic commentators - looks to us, as the plague of 1348 did to the people of medieval Europe, like an inexplicable and horrific exogamous calamity." As Herlihy himself puts it:
"Not long ago, the accounts of the medieval epidemics, preserved in the great warehouse of history, were regarded as irrelevant to modern life. AIDS had made them relevant again. How do people behave, when their environment becomes life-threatening? History here can serve; it remembers how societies coped in the past with the threat of mors repentina, unexpected death."

A certain amount of Herlihy's analysis (and Cohn's interpretation of it) will fall on deaf ears in much of the lay readership. It is important for scholars to wrestle with Malthusian and Marxist interpretations of population growth and decline, rather less so for ordinary folk. Suffice it to say that after careful scrutiny, Herlihy persuasively rejects the Malthusian argument that the Black Death arose in response to a human population expanding beyond the capacity of the food supply to feed it. He contends that what existed was "not a Malthusian crisis but a stalemate, in the sense that the community was maintaining at stable levels very large numbers over a lengthy period" and that the Black Death occurred entirely on its own.
It was "Europe's greatest known ecological disaster, and also the last of such magnitude it has had to endure." In many places population fell by 70 or 80 percent; "Europe about 1420 could have counted barely more than a third of the people it contained 100 years before." Precisely what the disease was remains unknown. The common assumption is that it was bubonic, but Herlihy suspects otherwise, believing that "different diseases were responsible for the epidemics of different years" and that - presumably in the case of the plague of 1348 - "they sometimes worked together synergistically to produce the staggering mortalities."

All that is meant for scholarly debate. What is most likely to interest the modern non-specialist reader about "The Black Death and the Transformation of the West" is the analysis implicit in the title's second part. Herlihy argues that, catastrophic though the plague may have been, it had crucial liberating effects. By reducing the population so significantly, it shook Europe out of its Malthusian deadlock and brought about monumental change:

"A more diversified economy, a more intensive use of capital, a more powerful technology, and a higher standard of living for the people - these seem the salient characteristics of the late medieval economy, after it recovered from the plague's initial shock and learned to cope with the problems raised by diminshed numbers. . . . Depopulation gave access to farms and renumerative jobs to a larger percentage of the population. High wages and low rents also raised the standard of living for substantial numbers. They became acquainted with a style of life that they or their children would not want easily to abandon."

THE BLACK DEATH AND THE
TRANSFORMATION OF THE WEST
by David Herlihy

Reviewed by Edward Tenner

As a teacher, the Brown University historian David Herlihy was a model medievalist, an unassuming man adept at unraveling technical details of demography and society, and equally able to provoke students with the big questions. His last and posthumous work (he died in 1991), though brief, is a splendid memorial.

We are approaching the 650th anniversary of Europe's worst natural disaster, the bubonic plague of 1348. The cataclysmic "Black Death"--a term coined in the 16th century and popularized in the 19th-reduced the continent's population by as much as two-thirds, leaving behind an indelible record in contemporary chronicles, art, and (in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron) literature. With the discovery of the bacillus Yersinia pestis a century ago, the biological roots of the epidemic became clear. The social factors behind the plague, however, remain controversial.

Herlihy addresses today's most widely accepted social explanations for the epidemic, the Malthusian and the Marxist. Did the Black Death result from overpopulation, declining living standards, and malnutrition, as the former theory suggests? The author thinks not, because European population had been high for decades without a major epidemic and because the population continued to fall for decades after the plague. Malnutrition may even have afforded some protection against disease; bacteria, like their human hosts, need nutrients to survive. Was the true cause, as the Marxist explanation holds, heightened exploitation of the peasantry by lords who, when the real value of their rents declined, turned to war and pillage? No, because nonfeudal regions such as Tuscany suffered similarly. Herlihy argues that the Europe of 1348 was stagnant but not in crisis. Its population density, though high with respect to available technology and resources, was sustainable when the plague struck. Whatever other social and economic patterns may have promoted the plague, the author discounts deprivation as a cause.

While the mass death was not a consequence of social decline, Herlihy contends, it did prove to be a terrible but effective catalyst for social renewal. It broke demographic, economic, and technological deadlocks by depleting the work force and raising labor costs. Landlords had to offer tenants forms of capital such as oxen and seed. Artisans had to extend guild apprenticeships beyond the family circle. Craftsman-entrepreneurs such as Johannes Gutenberg found ways to substitute technology for manpower. With soldiers and sailors as with scribes, the labor shortage stimulated innovation: introduction of firearms and larger ships.

Disease changed European culture, too. In higher education, the plague dealt a terrible blow to Oxford, whose student population declined from 30,000 to 6,000; in all, five of Europe's 30 universities had to close. Yet pious bequests and the need for new clergy led to new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge as well as innovative new universities in Prague and Florence. In science, the obviously contagious nature of the plague challenged Galenic medicine to modify a model of disease that recognized only imbalances of humors. The plague also left its mark on religion. The search for divine protection led to a new vigor in devotion to the saints (and to newly popular saints--in Florence, parents began to name their sons Sebastian, Bartholomew, and Christopher), which sharpened the already growing controversy over their role in Christianity. In some respects, then, mass mortality and depopulation may be healthy for technology, learning, faith, and other living forces: a cheerful reflection for the new millennium.

Reprinted from the Autumn 1997 Wilson Quarterly