Myths and Memories of the Black Death
Ben Dodds Department of History
Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-89057-5
ISBN 978-3-030-89058-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89058-2
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Acknowledgements
I have been fortunate to enjoy many hours of discussion about the Black Death in different academic contexts over the last twenty-fve years or so. In particular, I am indebted to the students at Durham University and at Florida State University who have taken classes with me on the Black Death. Their intellectual curiosity, challenging questions, criticism and humour have helped enormously. I would also like to acknowledge those who have made specifc contributions to this study. Catherine Batt, Lisa Bevevino, John S. Lee, Len Scales, Jonathan Theodore and Monica H. Green made valuable suggestions on individual chapters presented at conferences. Florida State University provided summer funding which permitted me to get this project off the ground. Robert Gellately alerted me to relevant articles in the press. Sandra Varry helped me navigate the Heritage and University Archives at Florida State University. Karen Maitland discussed her work as a novelist with me, and Jasmin Fox-Skelly discussed her science journalism. Richard Nevell showed me how to access information on Wikipedia usage, and Elias Larralde introduced me to video games incorporating Black Death memory. Nükhet Varlık shared her work with me prior to publication. Alex Brown and Peter Larson kindly read through and provided expert comments on drafts. Editors Molly Beck, Sam Stocker and Joe Johnson gave me a lot of wise advice and were always helpful and enthusiastic, and the publisher’s anonymous reader offered valuable guidance and constructive criticism. The generous friendship of Ed Gray and Greg Falstrom has made a big difference. The
new global pandemic during which large sections of this book were written has meant that my daughter Lily and son Arlo have been kept at home seven days a week. Their stoicism has been inspiring, and their sense of fun has kept me going. Finally, without the constant encouragement, ideas, willingness to discuss history and loving support of my wife Cathy McClive, there would be no book. I am deeply grateful to her.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In his bestselling history of the English people published in 1874, John Richard Green introduced the Black Death in these terms:
The most terrible plague which the world ever witnessed advanced at this juncture from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic, swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain.1
The impact of this sentence on the reader is all the greater because it comes in the middle of a long and detailed discussion of medieval land tenure. Suddenly, the reader is shocked: here is an unprecedented event, unparalleled since, represented by Green as a foreign menace destroying Europe. As we shall see, Green’s book was important in the development of Black Death memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It drew on new and long-standing interpretations, and it shaped popular and scholarly thinking on the subject.
As Green’s evocative description suggests, the Black Death has long been prominent in people’s perceptions of the past both as an event in itself and as a cause of subsequent change. These perceptions are the subject of the present study. The distant past plays an important role in cultural memory in modern societies. This does not mean that memories and myths associated with the Black Death and its effects are more important than those associated with more recent historical events. It is obvious, for example, that violent colonial encounters, the American Civil War, the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
B. Dodds, Myths and Memories of the Black Death, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89058-2_1
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Holocaust and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 play a powerful role in European, American and transnational cultural memory and do much to condition people’s response to events in the present. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that memory of the medieval past is linked to powerful myths in the minds of those who might show only a very vague interest in the period. It is the purpose of this book to explore Black Death memories and myths and to analyse the ways in which they relate to thinking and action in the modern world. This applies most obviously in the case of response to disease. It will also be demonstrated that memories of the Black Death and its consequences have affected perceptions of the trajectory of historical development and that these perceptions have been signifcant in forming different kinds of group identity from the late nineteenth century up to the present day.
The Black Death and its consequences feature in an enormous range of works from 1800 onwards including historical scholarship, novels, newspaper articles, flms, YouTube clips and so on.2 It is not possible to provide comprehensive coverage of the representation of the Black Death in any of these media; I have had to be selective, and some representations of the Black Death have been omitted. The purpose of this book is to explore the changing place of the Black Death and its effects in cultural memory. Often particular representations have been chosen because they circulated extensively in a particular period. These include Green’s A Short History of the English People which has already been cited and Ken Follett’s historical novel World Without End (2007) which has sold large numbers of copies and led to the production of a television mini-series. These different kinds of work draw on and develop cultural memory and have been important in the production and popularization of myths about the Black Death and its effects. They have also infuenced other representations of the pandemic. Some works which have been much less popular have also been considered. This applies mainly to historical scholarship, most of which never acquires a very wide readership but which can exert signifcant infuence on the representation of the Black Death and its consequences in other more popular media. Moreover, a particular episode never takes a single form or plays a single role in cultural memory: groups and individuals remember the past in different ways because it relates to their perception of the present and their own identity. Sometimes, therefore, it is useful to consider less popular works in which the Black Death and its aftermath are remembered in ways which subvert the most popular myths. The best example of such a work considered here is Sylvia Townsend
Warner’s historical novel The Corner That Held Them (1948) which shows how predominant myths about the middle ages can be undermined in an exploration of exclusion.
In this study, the focus is on Black Death memory since around 1800 in Britain and the United States, although some reference is also made to sources from earlier periods and other places. The chronological limits are the result of the greatly increased importance of Black Death memory from the early nineteenth century described in Chap. 2. New interpretations of the fourteenth-century pandemic and its historical importance meant that it became much more widely known and discussed. The geographical focus of the present study is explained partly by the pragmatic need to impose limits on the coverage given the enormous number of representations of the Black Death. However, as will be explained in Chap. 3, the Black Death has also become associated with historical narratives of English exceptionalism, that is the idea that English history has followed a distinctive trajectory, marked by continuity, and which is of special importance in global history.3 As such, the importance of Black Death memory in the English-speaking world was distinctive because it was integrated into narratives of the English and British national past and, to a lesser extent, those of the United States. Although these narratives originated in the nineteenth century, they continued to be prominent long after and even persist today. Perhaps partly as a result of such narratives, along with the survival of abundant primary sources relating to economic and social history in the fourteenth century in England, a distinctive and rich body of historical scholarship on the Black Death in England developed from the nineteenth century onwards. Scholars working on English sources made comparisons with other countries and, of course, rich sources survive from the fourteenth century elsewhere too, but the focus on historical scholarship and cultural memory relating to English history makes sense here too.
It is argued here that, as students and teachers of history, we need a clear understanding of cultural memory in order to work effectively. This applies most obviously in the classroom. It is much easier to teach medieval history if one has a sense of preconceptions about the period. Sometimes these are obvious, but often they are not. Moreover, there is an apparent contradiction in the fact that the relevance of studying the middle ages is not always apparent and yet medieval history and medievalinspired fantasy form a rich and popular part of contemporary culture. An examination of the place of the medieval past in cultural memory helps
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those studying the period to think about its signifcance in the recent past and the present. Those researching and writing about the past also beneft from an understanding of cultural memory. It used to be argued that historical scholarship was almost the opposite of cultural memory in the sense that its purpose was to reveal the truth about the past using reasoned analysis of primary sources. It is a premise of this study that this view of historical scholarship is not entirely sustainable, and that historical scholarship is one among many media in which memories are created and perpetuated.4 John Ganim, for example, has observed that scholarship on the middle ages shares some characteristics with popular fantasy medievalisms.5 Historians, like flm-makers or writers of fction, ask questions about the past which are connected to their concerns about the present. This does not mean that historical scholarship is simply a myth-building exercise perpetuating particular views of the present. Historical scholarship on the Black Death at least from the 1860s onwards and continuing until the present moment has been based on highly innovative and rigorous analysis of primary source material. Even so, as we shall see, historical work has produced and sustained powerful Black Death myths, and those myths have affected the questions scholars have asked and the conclusions they have reached. An awareness of cultural memory and its associated myths can therefore help historians question their perspective and challenge sources in new ways.
The terms cultural memory and myth have already been used, and further discussion is needed to defne exactly what is meant by these words in the context of this study. However, before discussing cultural memory and myth and scholarly approaches to these topics, it is helpful to outline the history of the Black Death itself.
The term Black Death is commonly applied to a pandemic which affected large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe during the middle years of the fourteenth century. It was caused by Yersinia pestis, the pathogen responsible for modern plague.6 The Black Death spread rapidly and caused very large numbers of deaths. Detailed mortality data do not survive from most areas affected, but the sources leave no doubt about the horrifying death toll in, for example, north Africa and western Asia.7 It has been estimated that around 60 per cent of the population died in England and parts of what are now Italy, France and Spain.8 Recent work has indicated that even in parts of the Low Countries, where the impact of the Black Death is often described as less severe than elsewhere, mortality might in fact have been as high as in other areas.9 The only examples of
epidemics which took an even greater toll on communities are those which spread through indigenous groups in the Americas following early contact with Europeans.10 Although there has been extraordinary progress in recent years in the scientifc understanding of the epidemiology of the Black Death, the reasons for the rapid dissemination of the disease are still not fully understood.11 It is likely that the disease spread from animal hosts to humans via insect vectors in many cases and also by direct human to human transmission. Recent work by Monica Green indicates that the “epidemiological process” of the pandemic began signifcantly earlier than previously thought, in the thirteenth and not the fourteenth century.12 In the summer and autumn of 1347 the pandemic arrived in Constantinople, Alexandria and Italian port cities when it spread throughout western Asia, North Africa and Europe; it appears it was still affecting communities in Russia in 1353.13
The spread of such a terrifying and destructive disease was met with religious responses in the Christian, Muslim and Jewish worlds. Many thousands of individuals responded to demands for prayer, and some went further joining organized penitential groups begging for God’s mercy.14 Many Jewish people were subjected to dreadful violence by Christians who blamed them for the plague.15 The lone survivor of a massacre of the Jewish community in La Baume in Provence, Dayas Quinoni, left a note in a salvaged copy of the Pentateuch in which he described his anguish using references to sacred texts.16 Black Death survivors’ grief was accompanied by many practical diffculties. An immediate problem in cities such as Cairo and London was making arrangements for the burial of all the dead.17 There was considerable disruption in government and other institutions caused by the deaths of those holding offce and diffculties collecting revenues and maintaining bureaucratic procedures. In Cairo, some of the mosques were forced to close because of the lack of offcials, although there were reports that people left their usual occupations to make money from the recitation of prayers and preparation of the dead.18 There was also sometimes surprising continuity and vigour in governmental initiatives and management of resources.19 Agriculture, the economic activity which occupied most people most of the time in the pre-industrial world, was disrupted, but those who survived or had not yet fallen ill continued to produce the basic necessities of life as best they could.20 It did not take long for elites to realize the potentially threatening economic situation they faced. Not only would high mortality sharply reduce the value of land, but it would also create a severe labour shortage forcing up
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wages. In western Europe, governments legislated in attempts to control labour in the rapidly changing economic circumstances.21
In the years which followed the Black Death, many experienced rising wages and improvements in living standards. Some peasants were able to accumulate larger landholdings and, in some places, the long-hated institutions of serfdom including forced labour services and the payment of manifold dues to lords disappeared.22 However, work on Egypt has demonstrated that, in a country where the structure of property rights was very different from that in western Europe, the Black Death led to a decline in crucial irrigation infrastructure and to falling prosperity in the countryside.23 In Europe, the Church struggled to recruit and educate priests to replace those who died. Even so, partly on the initiative of churchmen, in the decades following the Black Death the very culture of dying seems to have changed. An obsessive concern with imminent death and the need to prepare for it are apparent in vivid visual representations of death and dying.24 It would be wrong, though, automatically to attribute all the changes of the late-medieval world to the Black Death. Many of these changes had been underway prior to the Black Death. What is more, the Black Death itself was followed by renewed outbreaks of high mortality in further epidemics which contemporaries regarded as the return of the same disease.25 In short, the Black Death was a disaster of truly appalling proportions the likes of which has never been seen since but which represented the beginning of a long series of plague outbreaks. As such, it was an agent of historical change, but its precise effects are— like those of any other historical event—impossible to disentangle from other historical processes including longer-term demographic development, confict between social, economic and religious groups and so on.
1.1
RemembeRing the Distant Past
Unsurprisingly, the Black Death loomed large in the autobiographical memories of those who lived through it. In the Durham region in northern England, evidence indicates that half or a little more of the population died in 1349–1350 followed by the fight of numerous surviving tenants and attempts by landlords to maintain order.26 In the 1360s and 1370s, there was a legal dispute in Durham concerning the payment of mortuaries, customary offerings made on the deaths of parishioners. Both sides produced witnesses to attest to practice in the past, and the witnesses were able to recall from memory the names of those who had died in the “great
pestilence,” although there was some disagreement over whether a number of them had passed away before. In another related case litigated in Durham in the 1360s, one witness recalled having led a hundred beasts paid as mortuaries from the estates of those who had died in the Black Death to a cattle farm outside the city.27 For the community of Benedictine monks living in the same city, there was also formal remembering. In the late fourteenth century, the monks inserted a note in a breviary so the ffty-two brothers who died in the “First Pestilence” could be commemorated.28 The Black Death memories of the inhabitants of Durham were not unusual. For example, the canonization inquest held in Provence in 1363 for Countess Delphine de Puimichel demonstrates the way in which some people used the Black Death, which they referred to as the “frst mortality” to distinguish it from the recent 1361 pestilence, as a means of dating other things they recalled.29
As plague outbreaks recurred in the late-medieval and early modern periods, plague memory became more complex, circulating through written sources, places and monuments as well as through the recollections of individuals.30 For the purposes of the present study, the term memory is applied not only to autobiographical recall of the past but also to the engagement by people living from around 1800 onwards with historical events of centuries earlier. Obviously, no one living after 1800 had any autobiographical memory of the Black Death or had encountered anyone who did. Use has been made of the theories associated with the broad interdisciplinary feld of memory studies in order to defne the meaning of memory as it is applied here.
The terminology used in work on memory is varied and controversial. In this study, the term cultural memory is adopted. Astrid Erll defned cultural memory as “the sum total of all the processes (biological, medial, social) which are involved in the interplay of past and present within sociocultural contexts.” As Erll explained, this term includes both “the ‘cultural’ memory of the individual and the cultural ‘memory’ of social groups and societies.”31 It is important to note that this broad defnition comprises but also goes signifcantly beyond the narrower defnition of “cultural memory” developed in Jan Assmann’s work. For Assmann, “cultural memory” is different from “communicative memory”: the former is defned by deliberate formation by various authorities (priests, perhaps, or teachers), can relate to the distant past and is concerned with the perceived identity of groups of various kinds including religious groups and nations; the latter is defned by the oral communications which do not depend on
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authorities, are about the more recent past, and also circulate in groups, this time often families and generational groups.32 It is argued here, again following Erll, that for the purposes of this study Assmann’s distinction between “cultural” and “communicative” memory can be problematic. As will be argued over the course of this book, the memory of the distant past which can be so important in the formation of group identity often comes from popular culture and its associated participatory cultures in which the source of authority is not clear.33
The defnition of cultural memory provided above indicates that notions of the past, whether lived through or more distant, exist only in people’s minds but that those notions of the past are culturally conditioned and shared by wider groups in different social contexts including, for example, families and national communities. Jeffrey Olick’s distinction between what he terms “collected” and “collective” memory is helpful here. For Olick, the “collected” memory is the accumulation of recollections, images and representations of the past in individuals’ minds. As Maurice Halbwachs, one of the founders of sociological studies of memory observed, individuals’ memories are socially and culturally conditioned. Even autobiographical memories depend on the social and cultural context in which one is remembering.34 Nevertheless, Olick makes a useful distinction between these “collected” memories in individuals’ minds and “collective” memory, the latter referring to traditions, stories, heritage, institutions and so on through which memories circulate independently of individual minds. Erll shows how the interaction between collected and collective memories constitutes what might be thought of as cultural memory. In her terms, collective memory helps shape collected memory, and collected memory is a way of “actualizing” collective memory.35 This shows how Olick’s distinction helps to clarify the roles of “biological” and “social” processes in Erll’s broad defnition of cultural memory.
Erll also mentioned “medial” processes, and these are important too. This is most apparent in Olick’s defnition of collective memory. Groups’ collective memory can only exist through media, including most obviously print media but also museum exhibitions, classes at school and university and a vast array of digital media. Erll defned the role of media in collective memory as permitting the storage and dissemination of information about the past and also providing cues to trigger collective memories. An example of the trigger effect would be images of iconic megaliths at Stonehenge which conjure up collective memories of the distant past in Britain. It is also true that media provide a connection between collected and collective
memories, obvious examples being frst-hand accounts of experiences of war. However, even individuals’ collected memories depend on media, although the individuals might not always be conscious of the role of media in their autobiographical recollections of the past. This applies to the familiar uncertainty many individuals feel, especially when considering their early childhood, over whether a memory is a personal recollection or really a memory of a photograph or a story one has been told. It also applies more broadly, though, in the sense that we construct our own pasts to ft the social contexts in which we exist, social contexts which are themselves mediated. The role of media in the collective memory of the distant past is particularly complex. In fact, our memory of something like the Roman occupation in Britain might be less a memory of real events, the details of which might be unclear, and more a memory of media representations including, for instance, a reconstructed bath-house in a museum or an historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliffe. I shall return to what Erll describes as the “palimpsestic structure of existent media representations” in considering how memories are produced and circulated and the sources historians might use to analyse them.36
The broad defnition of cultural memory used in this study comprises both the collected memory and the collective memory, and the interactions between them. This defnition is used despite the potential confusion of using the term memory to refer to events which no living person actually experienced. The term memory is preferable to historical consciousness, for example, because memory implies an interaction between the present and the past and not just the awareness of some kind of fxed historical past. Moreover, we are not fully conscious of the operation of cultural memory: we often have half-formed memories about the past which we might not fully articulate.
1.2 Who RemembeRs anD Why Does it matteR?
The concept of cultural memory raises questions about who is or was remembering. In a lot of work on memory, the collective national memory is the subject of investigation. The work of French historian Pierre Nora has been particularly important here. Although Nora drew on Halbwachs in his observation that “there are as many memories as there are groups,” his own work on what he defned as lieux de mémoire or “sites of memory”—objects, rituals and symbols through which a group’s collective engagement with the past is channelled—concerned the memory
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of the French nation.37 However, the concept of cultural memory does not only apply in national contexts. Erll has pointed to work on “global memory studies” which is in some ways a reaction to Nora’s exploration of lieux de mémoire in a French national context. For example, there is a lot of work on the Holocaust as what Erll describes as a “global object of remembrance.” The Holocaust plays different roles in cultural memory in different national contexts, but clearly, this aspect of the European past in the twentieth century is remembered across the world in the early twentyfrst century.38 Moreover, as indicated in the quotation from Nora’s work above, even in a particular national context, there are various groups with different cultural memories of the national past.
The role of the middle ages in cultural memory in the United States is a good example of the contested memory of the distant past within a national community. The appropriation of medieval symbols by those hoping to take on the image of what they regard as the white male warrior culture of medieval Europe has become common among white supremacists and has attracted signifcant attention and disgust from the scholarly community.39 It would be absurd, though, to suggest that the middle ages have played a role in cultural memory in the United States only for those associated with white supremacist groups. Most striking is Matthew Vernon’s demonstration of the ways in which African-American writers used the medieval past to subvert the idea of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority as early as the nineteenth century. For example, James McCune Smith, a mid-nineteenth-century New York-based intellectual, physician and abolitionist, argued that medieval Britain had not been strengthened by racial purity but rather by “frequent admixtures or amalgamation of variously endowed men which grew out of these repeated invasions.”40
These examples demonstrate the political signifcance of cultural memory relating to the middle ages in the present day and relatively recent past. Andrew Elliott has defned how medievalisms, a term used for postmedieval references to the medieval past, are often deprived of any real historical content but can nevertheless be used to “anchor our ideas about identities and traditions, both forming and informing our sense of Self (and, by extension, our perception of the Other).”41 In the chapters that follow, the term myth will be used to describe a narrative about the past which may or may not have some basis in historical fact but which is important because it provides some explanation for the present based on the past. The ways in which myth has been defned and understood are manifold.42 Some further explanation is therefore required for the specifc
way in which the term is used in this study in connection with cultural memory.
An example of a myth in the sense in which it is employed here is that of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as it has been explored by Jonathan Theodore. This myth is a familiar narrative about the moral and intellectual disintegration of a great civilization which led to its collapse and replacement by much more primitive institutional, social and cultural structures. As Theodore pointed out, although this myth is based on history, most of its elements have been decisively discredited by historical scholarship on what is now referred to as “late antiquity.” Nevertheless, from the late nineteenth century at least the myth has remained a powerful one because it is perceived to contain truths about the present. It is often related, for example, to fears about the collapse of modern civilizations and that of the United States in particular. Indeed, the power of this particular myth in modern society is such that we fnd it diffcult to conceive of the historical trajectory of societies in any way other than rise, greatness and fall, and we are always inclined to explain the last of these in terms of some kind of degeneracy.43
Theodore explained his own use of the term myth to mean “a powerful conceptual model for understanding the role of belief in defning a particular conception of ‘reality,’ or the supposedly ‘true’ meanings contained in the external world.”44 He situated his use of the term in his study by drawing on the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Without accepting his far-reaching structural approach to the comparative analysis of myths, Theodore drew on Lévi-Strauss’ understanding of myths as stories which permit societies to make sense of chaotic and inconsistent reality. Lévi-Strauss emphasized that it is not enough to study single versions of myths: a comparative analysis of multiple versions employing complex and sophisticated methods is required. Theodore transferred this idea to the modern period and the circulation of myths in multiple media. He considered that analysis of the reproduction of the myth of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire across various media was needed to get a sense of its signifcance. One of Lévi-Strauss’ central ideas is that the “primitive” mind is really no different from the modern mind: myth is not the result of childish thinking in the distant past. Theodore developed this idea too in demonstrating that “myths continue to carry enormous relevance in the post-industrial age.”45 In thinking about myth in this way, Theodore demonstrated that the study of the myths circulating in a society is important
because they provide the frameworks within which members of that society think about their world and the challenges they face.
Myths help people defne their identity and that of the groups in which they operate. Priscilla Wald’s defnition is helpful here:
A myth is an explanatory story that is not specifcally authored, but emerges from a group as an expression of the origins and terms of its collective identity. Its strong emotional appeal derives from and affrms the fundamental values, hierarchies, and taxonomies that are preconditions of that identity.46
As Wald’s reference to origins suggests, an understanding of the past is an important component of myth. Theodore, for example, referred to the signifcance of the myth of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the “Western mind.”47 Ancient Rome is represented as “our” predecessor and “we” are worried things might turn out the same way for us. The formation and expression of identity through myth have been studied in many different societies. Myth in this sense intersects with cultural memory as defned above. Collective recollection of the past, developed and expressed in historical scholarship but also in historical fction, flms, museums and so on, often takes the form of narratives with which members of a group are familiar and through which they defne their sense of belonging. As Percy Cohen explained in his exploration of anthropological theories of myth, these kinds of historical narrative are also types of myth because they are stories about the past which have some factual basis, although this might be limited, and they relate to the present, contributing to some form of identity.48 Myths help defne identity, and they form part of cultural memory.
1.3
PRoDucing anD ciRculating memoRy anD myth
Cultural memory and associated myths are produced and circulated in many different media. The cultural historian must consider not only the contents of a particular source but also its circulation and reception. This is particularly complicated for the historian interested in cultural memory when it comes to considering historical scholarship itself. Specialized historical scholarship has a very small readership but may form the basis of more popular historical publications. In the case of the Black Death, the popular book by science-writer and historian John Kelly entitled The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating
Plague of All Time (2005) is a good example. This work has been widely read and reviewed in the press: it has more ratings than any other nonfction book about the Black Death on the American social cataloguing site Goodreads.49 In his book, Kelly referred to academic work on the Black Death, much of which must be beyond the reach of readers without access to a research library. Such readers therefore engage with scholarly research on the Black Death via Kelly’s discussion.
Popular history books are not the only means by which scholarly work on the Black Death circulates among a wider audience. Another obvious means by which this occurs is through teaching. The Black Death is one of the areas suggested for coverage in the English National Curriculum for children aged eleven to fourteen, and the popularity of Black Death source collections intended for university students shows its prominence in higher education curricula.50 Depending on the level and type of class, learning about the Black Death at school or university might give students the opportunity to read academic work for themselves.
Equally, memories are not only produced and reproduced in accounts of the past which purport to be purely factual: fctionalized accounts of the past are also important.51 The Black Death is richly represented in historical fction, for example, and this is therefore a medium which receives a great deal of attention in this study. Black Death historical fction ranges from the recent blend of horror and science fction in Helen Marshall’s The Migration (2019) to the now-forgotten children’s novel by Tom Bevan, Red Dickon the Outlaw: A Story of Mediaeval England, published at the beginning of the twentieth century. Historical novels do not generate and circulate memories in isolation: they interact with other media including historical scholarship. Many authors of historical novels provide supplementary notes in their work explaining the historical sources they have used, and novels are often advertised on the strength of the authenticity of their representations of the past with explicit acknowledgement of the role played by the imagination.52
Like historical novels, flms play a role in cultural memory not only through the fctionalized representations of the past they provide but also through references to earlier media on related issues and through associated media including reviews, televised discussions and classroom teaching.53 There are far fewer flms about the Black Death than about major events in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless true that the allknowing facial expression of Bengt Ekerot playing Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) is closely associated with Black Death
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memory. There are factual as well as fctionalized representations of the Black Death in visual media. In recent years, large numbers of viewers have accessed video clips about the Black Death on YouTube. For example, over three million people have watched American YouTuber Joseph Pisenti’s clip about the Black Death, posted on his channel RealLifeLore, in which the causes and consequences of the pandemic are explored in an eleven-minute lecture.54
Even the broad categories of historical scholarship, literature and flm do not cover all the media in which the Black Death is represented. Large numbers of people worldwide engage with the past through video games, some of which involve signifcant exploration of historical issues on the part of developers and players.55 These include, for example, the Europa Universalis series in which players make decisions concerning one particular country’s history from the middle ages until the nineteenth century. Players have to deal with the challenges presented by various historical phenomena including the Black Death.
It is relatively straightforward to see the connections between scholarship, literature, visual media and video games and cultural memory, but it is much more diffcult to establish what effect these media have in the minds of those who engage with them. Olick’s distinction between the collected and collective memory has already been referred to, and Erll’s observation that the collected memory actualizes the collective memory is fundamental. Memories only exist in people’s minds, whatever the form of their collective circulation in narratives of various kinds, monuments and so on. The diffculty, then, lies in working out what form this actualization takes. Again, the point must be emphasized that these media do not work in isolation: readers, viewers, gamers and so on already have memories of an historical episode, however vague, when they approach a book, flm or video game. Cultural memory is formed by layers of mediated representations of the past.56 This process can make the relationship between the past, cultural memory, media and the individuals engaging with the media very complex.
Lévi-Strauss’ work is often cited in this context. He described the process of myth-building as a form of bricolage, that is, like a project carried out by making use of whatever tools and materials one has at hand, often requiring the reuse of materials for new purposes.57 As explained above, the myth-maker/bricoleur’s “project” is making sense of the world and especially of apparent contradictions. For Lévi-Strauss, the metaphor is highly developed: he used it to explore similarities and differences between
modern scientifc thinking and myth and to defne aspects of the structures of which he perceived myths to be built. The bricolage metaphor might also be developed in thinking about how a reader, or consumer of other media, incorporates what she reads into her understanding of her world, herself and the society in which she lives. Michel de Certeau famously developed Lévi-Strauss’ idea of the bricoleur in his concept of the reader as “poacher.” He defned the reader poacher as follows:
Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across felds they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.58
We might liken the reader poacher to the myth-maker/bricoleur, but the problem lies in the fact that the nomads despoiling the riches of the literary environments they travel through are making sense of what they read in a personal way. Their engagement with what they read is often ephemeral: they might fnd some meaning in an image, in the representation of the past, in a character’s response to a situation, and then forget it again. It is obviously impossible to understand the meaning which every reader poacher takes from a book concerned with cultural memory whether it be an historical monograph, a textbook at school or university or an historical novel. The same applies to every viewer of a flm, player of a video game dealing with historical themes and so on. Even so, there are sources which provide some clues. The book itself, including its cover and associated paratexts (preface, blurb on the back, historical notes), provides some evidence. For example, readers of historical novels are sometimes presented with biographical notes about the author, in which their academic credentials are presented, indicating that they should consider the authenticity of the fctionalized history presented. In other words, marketing reveals something at least of how publishers expected readers to engage with the text.59 Published reviews of various media offer some clues as to consumer reactions to those media too, although the responses of reviewers might be very different from those of other consumers. The varying meanings found by different readers of novels have been explored by scholars. Janice Radway has demonstrated, for example, that the representation of hegemonic values in a novel does not automatically mean readers who enjoy the novel accept all those values; they might even read the
novel in ways which subvert those same values.60 All these sources and ideas will be used to explore the place of the Black Death in cultural memory.
1.4 myths anD memoRies of the black Death
The structure of this book is broadly chronological. It opens with a chapter on the representation of the Black Death in literature and scholarship in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and it closes with a consideration of the most recently scholarly and fctional representations of the medieval pandemic. A chronological trajectory in the way in which the Black Death is remembered and mythologized will become apparent too. The cholera outbreaks of the mid-nineteenth century contributed signifcantly to grizzly and cataclysmic representations of the Black Death. This was tempered as more work was done on the actual impact of the mid-fourteenth century pandemic and especially with the discovery of the plague pathogen at the end of the nineteenth century. This led to what might be termed Black Death triumphalism, the notion that this medieval disease was now conquered and manageable, although experience of plague epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant uncertainty persisted. During the twentieth century, historical work integrating the Black Death into broader frameworks for understanding the past also meant that the pandemic was no longer represented as a turning point in itself. Only more recently, with the questioning of the identifcation of the disease which caused the Black Death as plague and with new work on the connections between climate change and the Black Death has uncertainty deepened and Black Death triumphalism become more muted. That said, it has not proved possible to approach the subject in a ruthlessly chronological way. This is because memories and myths are not simply produced, circulated and then replaced.61 Many are much more persistent. It is possible to fnd powerful late-nineteenth-century Black Death myths circulating still in the early twenty-frst century. Over the course of the following chapters, new Black Death myths will be identifed and explained, but it will often be necessary to refer back to older myths and to explore their repurposing in new contexts. For an historical episode to continue to play a prominent role in cultural memory, it must be contested: consensus often leads to forgetting.62 We will also fnd, then, that conficting memories and myths about the Black Death develop and persist throughout.
notes
1. J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 241.
2. For the enormous extent of recent scholarly work on the Black Death, see Joris Roosen and Monica H. Green, “The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19—Bibliography,” accessed August 13, 2021, https://drive.google.com/fle/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/view?usp=sharing.
3. For observations on English exceptionalism and historical narratives, see David Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1–5.
4. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 39–44.
5. John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5.
6. Monica H. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020): 1603.
7. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 193–223; Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 99–107.
8. Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), 382–83.
9. Joris Roosen and Daniel R. Curtis, “The ‘Light Touch’ of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: An Urban Trick?” Economic History Review 72, no. 1 (February 2019): 32–56.
10. Monica H. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death,” Medieval Globe 1, no. 1 (2014): 9, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/3; Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13.
11. For recent scientifc work in which the limitations of our current understanding are acknowledged see Maria A. Spyrou et al., “Phylogeography of the Second Plague Pandemic Revealed Through Analysis of Historical Yersinia pestis Genomes,” Nature Communications 10, 4470 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12154-0. For the complexity of plague as a disease, see Katherine Royer, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague,” in Medicine and Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa, ed. Poonam Bala (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 109–10. 1
12. Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” 1603.
13. Benedictow, Black Death, 61, 63, 70, 211–15.
14. John Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347–1500 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 105–6, 108, 145–59.
15. Aberth, 169–92.
16. Susan L. Einbinder, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 53–56.
17. Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, 241; Duncan Hawkins, “The Black Death and the New London Cemeteries of 1348,” Antiquity 64, no. 224 (September 1990): 637–42.
18. Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, 239, 246.
19. W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 305–6, 356–61.
20. David Stone, “The Black Death and its Immediate Aftermath: Crisis and Change in the Fenland Economy, 1346–1353,” in Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death: Essays in Honour of John Hatcher, ed. Mark Bailey and Stephen Rigby (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 223–30.
21. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes Towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe,” Economic History Review 60, no. 3 (August 2007): 457–85.
22. Aberth, The Black Death: A New History, 217–19, 223–31.
23. Stuart J. Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005): 40–54.
24. Aberth, The Black Death: A New History, 117–21, 136–43.
25. Varlık, Plague and Empire, 118–25; Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, 223–31.
26. Richard Lomas, “The Black Death in County Durham,” Journal of Medieval History 15, no. 2 (June 1989): 130; P. L. Larson, Confict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1349–1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 80–82.
27. Margaret Harvey, Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 57, 98.
28. A. J. Piper, “The Size and Shape of Durham’s Monastic Community, 1274–1539,” in North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Christian D. Liddy and Richard H. Britnell (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 156 n. 15. Piper’s reference is to British Library Harley MS 4664, fo. 130v which can be viewed here: “Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts,” British Library, accessed April 27, 2021, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=22701.
B. DODDS
29. Nicole Archambeau, “The “First Mortality” as a Time Marker in Fourteenth-Century Provence,” in Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, ed. Katherine Randall and Tom Ewing (Blacksburg, VA: VT Publishing, 2018), 157.
30. Ann G. Carmichael, “The Last Past Plague: The Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 53, no. 2 (April 1998): 132–60.
31. Erll, Memory in Culture, 101.
32. Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll, and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 109–18; Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Cultural Memory and Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer 1995): 125–33.
33. Erll, Memory in Culture, 30–31.
34. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 46–53.
35. Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 3 (November 1999): 333–48; Erll, Memory in Culture, 99.
36. Erll, Memory in Culture, 126–41 (quotation on p. 141).
37. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24 (quotation on p. 9).
38. Erll, Memory in Culture, 62–65.
39. David M. Perry, “What To Do when Nazis are Obsessed With Your Field: How Medieval Historians Can Counter White Supremacy,” Pacifc Standard, September 6, 2017, https://psmag.com/education/nazis-lovetaylor-swift-and-also-the-crusades; “Medieval Memes: The Far Right’s New Fascination with the Middle Ages,” The Economist, January 2, 2017, https://www.economist.com/democracy- in- america/2017/01/02/ the-far-rights-new-fascination-with-the-middle-ages.
40. Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 50–51. Vernon quoted James McCune Smith, “The German Invasion,” Anglo-African Magazine, February 1, 1859, 44.
41. Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 16.
42. See Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially pp. 1–6.
43. Jonathan Theodore, The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 195–99.
B. DODDS
44. Theodore, 43.
45. Theodore, 46–50 (quotation on p. 49); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 206–31.
46. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 9.
47. Theodore, Modern Cultural Myth, 198.
48. Percy S. Cohen, “Theories of Myth,” Man 4, no. 3 (September 1969): 352; Theodore, Modern Cultural Myth, 43–44.
49. On December 18, 2020 John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) had 7187 ratings. The second highest-rated Black Death book was Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: HarperCollins, 2002) with 4546 ratings. https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=black+death&qid= vKbIBdLVWN
50. “History Programmes of Study: Key Stage 3. National Curriculum in England,” Department for Education, accessed April 24, 2021, https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/fle/239075/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_History.pdf. Two popular primary source collections have been in print since 1994 and 2005 respectively: Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); John Aberth, ed., The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005).
51. Erll, Memory in Culture, 77–82; Ann Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing,” in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Erll, Nünning and Young, 345–53.
52. Jerome De Groot, The Historical Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 7–9.
53. Paul Grainge, “Introduction: Memory and Popular Film,” in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1–20; Astrid Erll, “Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Erll, Nünning and Young, 395–96.
54. RealLifeLore, “The Black Death: Worst Pandemic in History Visualized,” YouTube, April 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Qw2OBCfXsEo.
55. Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 13–15.
56. Erll, Memory in Culture, 139–43.
1 INTRODUCTION
57. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17–21; Theodore, Modern Cultural Myth, 46–47.
58. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 174.
59. De Groot, Historical Novel, 59–64.
60. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 101–14, 186–208.
61. Theodore, Modern Cultural Myth, 12.
62. Rigney, “Dynamics of Remembrance”.
CHAPTER
