Merle Eisenberg (Author)
Lee Mordechai (Author)
This article explores how plague—as an idea—became an ahistorical independent agent of historical change. It focuses on the case of the Justinianic Plague (ca. 541–750 c.e.), the first major recorded plague pandemic in Mediterranean history, which has increasingly been used to explain significant demographic, political, social, economic, and cultural change during late antiquity (ca. 300–800 c.e.). We argue that the Justinianic Plague retains its great historiographic power—namely, its supposed destructive impact over two centuries—because it evokes a terrifying myth of what plague should do rather than because of conclusive evidence of what it did. We define this historiographic power as the plague concept. It includes three key features: extensive chronology (lasting for two centuries), mortality (catastrophic death toll), and geography (global). The plague concept is built on three interdisciplinary types of evidence (here termed truisms): rats, climate, and paleogenetics. Our article traces how scientists constructed the plague concept in the first half of the twentieth century, and how historians entered the discussion in the last third of that century. As historians engaged in Justinianic Plague research, they used the plague concept to frame their arguments without problematizing its presence or contesting features that scientists had constructed decades earlier.
...More
Article
Nükhet Varlık;
(2023)
Plague in the Mediterranean and Islamicate World
(/isis/citation/CBB072233079/)
Article
Monica H. Green;
(2020)
The Four Black Deaths
(/isis/citation/CBB190514768/)
Article
John Mulhall;
(2019)
Plague before the Pandemics: The Greek Medical Evidence for Bubonic Plague before the Sixth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB241621497/)
Book
Lester K. Little;
(2008)
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750
(/isis/citation/CBB393953172/)
Article
James Stark;
(2023)
Making Microbes: Theorizing the Invisible in Historical Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB108538466/)
Article
Rebecca Flemming;
(2023)
Pandemics in the Ancient Mediterranean World
(/isis/citation/CBB349529003/)
Article
Christos Lynteris;
(2019)
Pestis Minor: The History of a Contested Plague Pathology
(/isis/citation/CBB470982762/)
Article
Lukas Engelmann;
(2020)
A Plague of Kinyounism: The Caricatures of Bacteriology in 1900 San Francisco
(/isis/citation/CBB109937480/)
Article
Kyu-hwan Sihn;
(2017)
Reorganizing Hospital Space: The 1894 Plague Epidemic in Hong Kong and the Germ Theory
(/isis/citation/CBB906774070/)
Article
Hawgood, Barbara J.;
(2007)
Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, CIE (1860--1930): Prophylactic Vaccination against Cholera and Bubonic Plague in British India
(/isis/citation/CBB000831622/)
Article
Tim Urban;
Melissa Littlefield;
Rajani Sudan;
(2021)
Special Issue: Science, Technology, and Literature during Plague and Pandemics
(/isis/citation/CBB143299679/)
Book
Ben Dodds;
(2021)
Myths and Memories of the Black Death
(/isis/citation/CBB440335571/)
Article
Alexandre I. R. White;
(2018)
Global Risks, Divergent Pandemics: Contrasting Responses to Bubonic Plague and Smallpox in 1901 Cape Town
(/isis/citation/CBB075639297/)
Article
Paloma Ruiz Vega;
(2021)
Farmacia e medicina nelle pandemie di peste nel corso della storia
(/isis/citation/CBB819821879/)
Book
Byrne, Joseph Patrick;
(2012)
Encyclopedia of the Black Death
(/isis/citation/CBB001251684/)
Article
Maria Conforti;
(2023)
History of Epidemics: A Bibliographical Essay on Secondary Sources in Italian and on Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB899693707/)
Article
Buell, Paul D.;
(2012)
Qubilai and the Rats
(/isis/citation/CBB001211310/)
Book
Chinmay Tumbe;
(2020)
Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World
(/isis/citation/CBB905101091/)
Book
Elisa Tinelli;
(2024)
Storia letteraria delle malattie. La narrazione del contagio dal Medioevo all’Età Moderna
(/isis/citation/CBB211165645/)
Article
Nükhet Varlık;
(2020)
Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of Covid-19
(/isis/citation/CBB776966901/)
Be the first to comment!