The Black Death and Human Memory
Honors Seminar
Spring MMIII
Dr Joseph P Byrne

The Black Death and Human Memory...
    is an interdisciplinary Honors Seminar in which we will explore the roles of disease in dividing the
modern world from the middle ages. The contemporary threats of epidemic outbreaks of anthrax, AIDS, ebola and smallpox, and the cases of plague in New York City as recently as November of 2002 remind us of our vulnerability as humans, and as a human society. Interestingly, it is at this very moment that the wide world of academic scholarship is questioning virtually every aspect of the fourteenth-century plague and its effects on society. Thus, our task will not only be to study the historical phenomenon itself, but how we have come to know about it in the past, and how scholars are reshaping this understanding today. Ours will be an active engagement with research in fields as far apart as art and demographics, history and DNA studies, poetry and social psychology.

The Course of the Course


1/9   Introduction to the Course and its Problematique
1/14
  Plague in the Ancient World: 
     The problems of identification in Thucydides, Galen and Biblical accounts
1/16   The First Pandemic (542-c.740 AD): Sources and theories

1/21
  Life in the Fourteenth Century before the Plague: Preconditions?
1/23   Geography of Death: Mapping the disease’s Spread

1/28
  The Chroniclers’ Lament: Creating and Interpreting the Record of the Pestilence
1/30   The Black Death: Contemporary theories in The Christian West and Islam 

2/4
  Cause—Effect—Prevention – Cure: The elusive linkage 
2/6   Responses East and West: A comparative model

2/11
  The Flagellants: Societal response or personal perversion?  {Klein}
2/13   The Black Death and The Jews in the Christian West

2/18
  Counting the Victims, Burying Them, Remembering Them 
2/20   Economic Effects in City and Countryside

2/25
  Did the Church Learn Its Lesson? 
2/27   Did the Plague End English Feudalism? If so how? If not why not? {Swindell}

3/11
  Man and Microbes {Dr. Thomas} 
3/13   Bacteriology and the Bubonic Plague {Dr. Thomas} 

3/18
  By the way... what did cause the Black Death? {Barber}
3/20   What do you mean ‘no rats’?  {Carlson}

3/25		   The Plague and Art: The Meiss Thesis and its Critics
3/27   The Plague, Individualism and Renaissance Humanism

4/1		   Education in the Wake of the Plague  {Minnick}
4/3  The Rise of the Vernacular: Another effect of the plague?  {Sloan}

4/8
  Patterns of Recurrence in the West
4/10   Long-term European Demographics and Plague 

4/15
  Long-term developments in coping: Public Health as a societal priority 

4/22		   The Plague Disappears in the West...Why?   {Gallo}
4/24   Epilogue: The Plague and I 
Muddy Creek Lutheran Cemetery, Lancaster Co., PA
Required Books

Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester Medieval Sources)
 [A collection of 127 translated sources from the period]

William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples
 [Despite its age, still the best overview of man’s relationship to microbe on the world stage]

Philip Ziegler, The Black Death
 [The standard narrative treatment of the plague in the medieval west]

Course Requirements

1. Participation in Discussion  20%
2. Project and Presentation 30%
3. Précis and Position Papers 30%
4. Phinal Examination 20%

1. Participation is expected of each student at each class meeting. Grades can indeed range from A to F.

2. You will prepare and present to the class a project that deals with the matters covered in this class. This will entail the combination of two (or more) disciplinary approaches to a specific question or topic related to the Second Pandemic: for example relating concepts or theories of the disease’s origins to changes in religious practice or expression. You will discuss these with me well in advance and we will agree upon the terms of your project and the means by which you will present it.

3. During the course we will read a good many works, of both primary and secondary natures. For many of these you will write short (no more than a page) précis that merely summarize the work; for some you will write short critiques. For two of the sessions above that end with question marks, you will write short position papers that take a stand on the issue and present your case based on the literature. These will be no more than about 5 pages in length each.

4. Phinal exam will be in the form of an essay, for which you will have about one hour to write.

5. Attendance at every class meeting is required. Exceptions for grave illness (excepting plague) and university-mandated functions will be made grudgingly and rarely.

English Language Articles
English Language Books
Non-English Articles
Non-English Books; Other media; Primary sources

e-mail me at byrnej@mail.belmont.edu