Five Ways in Which the Medieval is Relevant Today (original) (raw)
Editors' Introduction: Pandemic Experiences and Making the Medieval Relevant
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 2021
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PANDEMIC DISEASE IN THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
The Medieval Globe provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars of all world areas by focusing on convergence, movement, and interdependence. Con tributions to a global understanding of the medieval period (broadly defined) need not encompass the globe in any territorial sense. Rather, TMG advan ces a new theory and praxis of medieval studies by bringing into view phenomena that have been rendered practically or conceptually invisible by anachronistic boundaries, categories, and expectations. TMG also broadens dis cussion of the ways that medieval processes inform the global present and shape visions of the future.
Making the Medieval Relevant, 2020
This introductory chapter puts forward a case for the continuing importance of studying the European Middle Ages. The early twenty-first century is witness to a boom in popular interest in the medieval, one which is playing a significant role in shaping both politics and popular culture. Paradoxically, while this boom has led to increasing study of 'medievalism', investment in the disciplines that involve the study of the Middle Ages themselves is in relative decline with questions frequently raised about the value of such research. This chapter begins by examining the challenges that necessitate a defence of research whose key focus is the period between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. It goes on to consider the nature of the relationship that has developed between Modernity and the Middle Ages and reflects on the changing role that medieval scholars have played in society since History emerged as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century. It poses the important question of what a focus on the medieval might offer contemporary society, arguing that a significant distinction should be drawn between 'usefulness' and 'relevance'. It contends that not only does the medieval remain relevant but that that relevance is to be found in surprising , frequently overlooked, areas that range from advancing modern medical knowledge and assessing the impact of climate change to informing contemporary political and social discourse. [The entire volume is available in open access!]
The greatest health problem of the Middle Ages? Estimating the burden of disease in medieval England
International Journal of Paleopathology, 2021
To identify the major health problems of the Middle Ages. Bubonic plague is often considered the greatest health disaster in medieval history, but this has never been systematically investigated. Materials: We triangulate upon the problem using (i) modern WHO data on disease in the modern developing world, (ii) historical evidence for England such as post-medieval Bills of Mortality, and (iii) prevalences derived from original and published palaeopathological studies. Methods: Systematic analysis of the consequences of these health conditions using Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) according to the Global Burden of Disease methodology. Results: Infant and child death due to varied causes had the greatest impact upon population and health, followed by a range of chronic/infectious diseases, with tuberculosis probably being the next most significant one. Conclusions: Among medieval health problems, we estimate that plague was probably 7th-10th in overall importance. Although lethal and disruptive, it struck only periodically and had less cumulative long-term human consequences than chronically endemic conditions (e.g. bacterial and viral infections causing infant and child death, tuberculosis, and other pathogens). Significance: In contrast to modern health regimes, medieval health was above all an ecological struggle against a diverse host of infectious pathogens; social inequality was probably also an important contributing factor. Limitations: Methodological assumptions and use of proxy data mean that only approximate modelling of prevalences is possible. Suggestions for further research: Progress in understanding medieval health really depends upon understanding ancient infectious disease through further development of biomolecular methods.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2013
The potential for pandemic disaster in an overpopulated, overglobalized, and overexploitive human world has provided inspiration for popular science writers since the early 1990s. Such works typically combine microbiology with storytelling and may also, as in Wolfe's The Viral Storm, draw on such relevant disciplines as anthropology, entomology, zoology, and history to enrich their doomsday scenarios. 1 In these accounts, the interdisciplinary components are clearly visible. Contagion takes a different approach. Praised by William J. Bernstein on the jacket for its seamless synthesis of "pathophysiology, propulsion technology and political economy," Contagion offers a methodology that is less evidently pluralistic and more that of a historian using accepted historical approaches-principally political and economic-to answer the questions that he raises: How has long-distance trade spread epidemic disease (in humans, animals, and plants) in the past, and what measures have been taken to prevent such spread? In Harrison's accounts of most diseases, however, the pathophysiology is lightly in evidence, and "propulsion technology" might better be understood as an economic historian's normal alertness to the effects of changing methods of transport. Unlike the popular science writers, Harrison has no interest in the genesis of new diseases or of virulent disease strains, and so no need to make use of anthropology, biology, or even epidemiology in constructing his analysis. His aim is less to shock popular awareness of danger than to provide a historically rich analysis that will act as a wake up call to politicians and planners. Harrison's story begins with the Black Death in the 1340s and continues through to sars and avian inºuenza in the twenty-ªrst century. Between the Plague of Justinian (541-762 a.d.) and the Black Death, he reminds us, the world was notably free from pandemic infections. Not until the thirteenth century did populations and trade networks recover sufªciently from Dark Age depression to provide transport and fodder for opportunistic pathogens. Quarantine-the historical approach to wildªre infections-is a central player around which Harrison traces the shifting political and economic repercussions of policy. Plague dominates the earlier centuries; successive cholera epidemics in the later nineteenth century, and the resurgence of pandemic yellow fever and plague, mark the points at which both disease and commerce became "truly global" (xv). Indeed, the ªrst remotely coherent international response to plague was devised in response to the third plague pandemic of the 1890s, which caused signiªcant commercial disruption and political disagreement. Surveillance and containment were the essence of this response. Harrison meticulously charts the political and economic pressures that enmeshed such disease episodes. Self-interest,
2013
This innovative course attempted to answer the following question: with the Digital Revolution making so much of medieval material culture newly available online, was there a way to reinvent undergraduate pedagogy to allow students direct access to unedited medieval texts and all the cultural knowledge they contained? We chose a hitherto unedited text on fertility and childbirth, Pierre Andrieu's *Pomum aureum* (The Golden Apple, 1444), which had been written for the Count of Foix, and designed a course around it that explored the History of the Book (codicology, paleography) and the history of reproductive medicine. Our aim was not simply to start work on editing the text, but also to raise the myriad historical questions that needed to be asked about the investments that hereditary monarchs and nobles had to make in their personal reproductive success. We wrote a five-part blog to summarize our efforts, as follows: Royal Mothers, Part I: A Text Comes To Life, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/06/24/royal-mothers-part-1-a-text-comes-to-life/ Royal Mothers, Part II: Down the Rabbit Hole We Went, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/06/30/royal-mothers-part-ii-down-the-rabbit-hole-we-went/ Royal Mothers, Part III: A ‘Pregnant’ Text, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/07/24/177/ Royal Mothers, Part IV: What On Earth Did Pierre André Mean?, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/08/15/royal-mothers-part-iv-what-on-earth-did-pierre-andre-mean/ Royal Mothers, Part V: Looking Ahead While Celebrating a Royal Birth, http://theresaearenfight.com/2013/08/19/royal-mothers-part-v-looking-ahead-while-celebrating-a-royal-birth/
Isis Critical Bibliography, 2021
In 2020, the *Isis Critical Bibliography*, published by the History of Science Society, embarked on a Pandemics special issue to gather together essay reviews and curated bibliographies on the historiographies of the world's pandemics. I was asked to contribute an essay on medieval pandemics. Realizing that the editors had not commissioned a contribution on the premodern New World, I submitted two essays. This essay was written to complement one on epidemic diseases present in the Americas and Oceania before and after Old World contact. Focusing on the Old World (Eurasia and Africa), the present essay had two main objectives: to explain why the entry of "palaeosciences" was transforming the field of infectious disease history, and to use the example of plague (cause of the Black Death) to show how findings from genetics were bringing new perspectives to the questions historians ask. Both essays argued for the need to frame analysis of pandemics within Global History. The editors, however, had no interest in my double contribution and did not even send the 2nd essay out to two readers with expertise in the pre-modern world. I thereupon withdrew both essays. The present essay (on plague) was massively rewritten and was published in 2022 as "A New Definition of the Black Death: Genetic Findings and Historical Interpretations,” De Medio Aevo 11, no. 2 (2022), 139-55, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/dmae.83788\. I'm leaving this draft version here, however, in the event that it might be enlightening for graduate students to see something of the internal politics of how History of Science develops. I welcome comments via email (monica.h.green@gmail.com) or via Bluesky (@monicaMedHist.bsky.social).