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New thread of quick reading on the current state of Black Death studies (for new followers). I'm listing only #OpenAccess work, but remember that good scholarship costs $$, just like anything else of value. Buy books directly from publishers or your local bookstore, if you can.
1) probably my most succinct statement on what we know about the history of #plague as a disease (which is caused by the bacterium #YersiniaPestis) is this note about the plague outbreak in Madagascar in 2017: http://www.thismess.net/2017/10/medieval-madagascar.html. (Support editor @Lollardfish if you can.)
2) I don't work on the demographic questions of plague mortality myself, but these two recent pieces--one on England, the other on the Middle East--both come to the same conclusion: maybe we better take seriously the upper, rather than the lower, estimates of mortality for 14thC.
2a) Carenza Lewis, “Disaster Recovery: New Archaeological Evidence for the Long-Term Impact of the ‘Calamitous’ Fourteenth Century,” Antiquity (2016), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/disaster-recovery-new-archaeological-evidence-for-the-longterm-impact-of-the-calamitous-fourteenth-century/278BAD8206E24DE2D7C473B135F361EB. (Sorry, not #OA, but it is the foundational study right now for England.)
2b) Stuart Borsch & Sabraa, Tarek, “Refugees of the Black Death: Quantifying Rural Migration for Plague and Other Environmental Disasters,” Annales de Démographie Historique, https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_ADH_134_0063--refugees-of-the-black-death.htm.
3) if you're ready for a deeper dive, there's this: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/.
3) if you're ready for a deeper dive, there's this: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/.
Historians of medicine on Twitter can be found here: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1233255263706107905. Economic historians who work on plague: @guido_alfani @joris_roosen @DanielRCurtis1. Wikipedian who tracks #BlackDeath: @RichardNevell. Geneticists: @ma_spyrou @Marcel__Keller @gunnar_neumann.
Historical vector modeling: @BorisVSchmid. Bioarchaeology of #plague: @SharonDeWitte. A final reminder: plague is a completely different disease from #COVID19. The Black Death occurred when there were no meaningful ways to monitor, let alone intervene in, plague outbreaks.
