THE author describes his own experience of catching Covid, the 21st-century plague, as having given him an understanding of the personal impact of such an infection and the experience of its effect on contemporary society. This helps to make the book a vividly “close-up” account.

The subtitle of this study suggests that it takes a world-view, though it confines itself largely to the medieval “world” of Europe, North Africa, and and Byzantine Near East, where the experiences of Christians, Muslims, and Jews are best recorded. It looks closely at contemporary responses to the pandemic through reconstruction of the lives of those afflicted. Focusing on the experience of individuals who had told their own tales, it brings to life individuals in every social class. These include well-known figures — for example, Boccaccio in Chapter 5 — making detailed discussion possible. It does not confine itself to a close-up of the Black Death’s spread from door to door and family to family, but also considers the possibility that the sheer scale of Black Death brought about huge change. The author suggests that it had a place in the fall of empires.

Covid-like pandemics have occurred in many generations. The Plague of London in 1665-66 and the Plague in Marseilles in the 18th century are mentioned. Whose fault was it? Accounts of its symptoms and the speed with which it spread and caused death point encouraged commentators to point to the same cause in different episodes. In the Middle Ages blame was laid on a group of 14th-century Jews. It soon became clear that it was highly infectious. In the late 19th century, in the period when vaccination for smallpox was under way, the Swiss-French scientist Alexandre Yersin suggested that the illness might be caused by germs.

This study is divided into four sections, beginning with the first appearance of the Black Death in a society in which trade was encouraging travel and helped to spread it. Asbridge suggests that when it emerged in Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, it readily spread inland from those Italian ports into Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. With the Plague consequently causing considerable social upheaval, the second section traces both a descent into “crisis” and the recovery of society from the “catastrophe”. Here, Asbridge explores political consequences of the deaths of monarchs and other leaders, and the impact of the Black Death is considered from further angles from a historical point of view.

Part Three sets the Plague in the context of the study of “medicine” at the time when it made its appearance, with medicine one of the first subjects studied in the early universities alongside law and theology. There were impacts on theology, too, and the undermining of religion is explored under “the Questioning of Faith”, though it is not the book’s first question whether it was widely felt as a deserved divine punishment.

But what was the Black Death? Was this series of pandemics all caused by the same infection? Asbridge addresses this question in his eighth chapter. It cannot be answered without the tests available to modern science. But perhaps that does not matter; for the historical and social consequences of what was perceived to be a pandemic do not depend on the same “Black Death” having been responsible throughout.

This long story of an infection with a long history as well as an extensive spread is told engagingly, through examples and lively characterisation. The notes give full details of sources, though an additional bibliography would be helpful.

Dr G. R. Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.

The Black Death: A global history
Thomas Asbridge
Allen Lane £40
(978-0-241-39940-8)
Church Times Bookshop £36