The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe.

The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. By Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002. xii plus 318 pp.).

The Black Death of 1347-52 has long been recognized as one of the watersheds in European history. Historians have argued for the pandemic's important yet divergent consequences, ranging from despondence and a preoccupation with the macabre to economic restructuring and the birth of Renaissance humanism. The nature and causes of this devastating contagion, which killed one-third of the European population, remained a scientific mystery for centuries. With the discovery of the modern plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, in 1894, the issue seemed resolved: the Black Death was the disease now known as bubonic plague.

In this provocative book, Samuel Cohn re-examines the evidence for the equation of medieval and modern bubonic plague, and comes to some startling conclusions. Cohn breaks the suspense at the outset: the Black Death was "any disease other than" rat-based bubonic plague. (p. 1) He identifies four characteristics of medieval "plague" that distinguish it from its modern version: speedy transmission, lightning contagion, high mortality rates, and acquired immunity over time. None of these epidemiological features characterized the great out breaks of bubonic plague in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India and China, which form the basis of modern plague understanding. Moreover, massive epizootics--benchmarks of modern plague--are missing in medieval plague experience. Rather than confronting evidence critically, historians and scientists allegedly "have taken the epidemiology of the modern plague and imposed it on the past." (p. 2) In turn, the Black Death affected modern plague experience, as officials in British India intervened to avoid a similar catastrophe, even though plague was never as virulent there as malaria, influenza, tuberculosis, or other tropical diseases.

Cohn's agenda is thus an ambitious one: to dispel the notion that medieval and modern plague were the same disease. He attempts to meet this challenge by using an equally ambitious and deeply impressive source base. Cohn begins with an exhaustive examination of narrative sources--over 400 chronicles, 250 plague tracts, 50 saints' lives, and merchant letters from across Europe--before turning to archival evidence, including over 40,000 death documents such as wills, confraternal obituaries, and burial records. Because of the wealth and range of sources, however, the analysis moves uneasily between large geographical regions and highly localized experiences; the bulk of archival sources derive from Tuscany and Umbria, whereas the narrative sources reach much farther afield. Organizing the book around source type--a strategy intended to explode conventional wisdom through the sheer mass of material--also results in considerable repetition, despite its systematic advantages.

Part One distinguishes meticulously between what is known about the behavior of modern and medieval plague as a disease. Delving into reports of British plague researchers in India, Cohn establishes that high humidity levels and bumper crops of grain furnish the biological and climatic conditions for modern bubonic plague, with rats and fleas acting as vectors for human transmission. These conditions were not uniformly present in medieval plague episodes, nor is there a demonstrated connection between grain repositories, which harbored rats, and plague distribution in the medieval period. In reviewing previous literature, Cohn roundly criticizes modern historians who ignore contradictions in order to "square the circle" between medieval and modern plague. While some of his observations are sharp-eyed, others collapse important distinctions between historians' reasoned inferences and any unwarranted claims.

Part Two carefully examines the signs and symptoms of the Black Death reported in contemporary chronicles, plague tracts, and saints' lives. From these records Cohn culls the distinctive signs of medieval plague to compare them point by point with modern plague. For example, plague tracts, written mainly by university-trained doctors, referred primarily to spots, pustules, and multiple skin ulcerations, not to the localized swellings (buboes) evident in modern plague. Symptomologies showed similar differences, especially the longer incubation period of medieval plague. Moreover, epidemiological patterns derived from death documents, discussed in Part Three, were far from identical. Unlike modern plague, the Black Death killed in household clusters, with humans exposed to the disease later developing immunity--a trait not seen in modern plague. The summer seasonality of Mediterranean plague ran counter to the high humidity factor associated with modern plague; the exceptionally rapid spread of the disease in 1348 and afterwards points to the lack of

an insect vector, perhaps toward influenza. Despite small discrepancies between medieval sources and variations in place, the lesson is clear: the signs, symptoms, and epidemiology of medieval and modern plague "diverged on one crucial count after another." (p. 81)

The concluding chapter, which seems structurally disconnected and hastily written, poses complex questions about the relationship between disease, culture, and psychology. Cohn summarizes his extensive publications on changing mentalities in the hundred years after the Black Death, based primarily on quantitative analyses of Italian wills. He points to a great age of Renaissance selfishness seen in property relations, commemorative bequests and artistic commissions. To this evaluation he adds new, undeveloped claims about the growing confidence of doctors in their healing powers following plague, and assembles a grab-bag of loosely related questions about cultural and psychological responses to epidemics over time.

The most significant interpretive issue at stake here is whether we can "keep both Burckhardt and Huizinga" (p. 252): that is, whether the Black Death ushered in an age of melancholy and despair or one of optimism and a new Renaissance psychology. Curiously, he rejects the view that "[d]ifferences in the disease's mortalities may have conditioned different mental responses" in favor of a more uniform European adaptation, without working carefully through the argument. (p. 245) At the same time he posits that recurring diseases like medieval plague "will have different psychological and cultural consequences" than single epidemics. (p. 251) Thus while Cohn is fastidious about analyzing sources, he is less successful in portraying social and cultural consequences of the pandemic, in demonstrating causality in different domains of historical experience, and in connecting pieces of his argument.

Does Cohn succeed in "transforming" the Black Death by breaking the link with bubonic plague? Yes and no. The aggregate evidence for the mismatch between medieval and modern plague is indeed compelling, forcing us to rethink conventional wisdom. Yet he summarily dismisses the view that the Black Death may have been a confluence of several diseases, including bubonic plague. In place of Yersinia pestis, Cohn offers no alternatives. At the end of this important book, we have traded one mystery for another.

Sharon T. Strocchia

Emory University