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This article critiques the debate over the extent to which labor shortages caused by the Black Death and subsequent epidemics empowered women economically, and whether this had significant implications for overall demographic behavior and long‐term economic performance. Some historians have argued that after ca. 1350 women in the North Sea region were drawn into the land and labor markets to a far greater extent than women in other parts of Europe, and in particular into employment as single live‐in servants, which led to a rise in the average age of women at first marriage and the proportion of women never marrying. This in turn led to the formation of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which is associated with fertility restriction and higher levels of household income. The evidence and arguments underpinning this viewpoint are critically evaluated for England, where by 1600 the EMP was certainly established. The extant sources do not enable us to measure the extent of women's financial gains after the Black Death, or to assess changes in their marital choices. There is no convincing evidence for any rise in the proportion of single female servants in the century after the Black Death or for the existence of the EMP before 1550. Young women did not increase their participation in the land market in order to construct a marriage fund. The article concludes by assessing the possible chronologies of England's transition to the EMP, and by suggesting new lines of enquiry about structural changes in women's work during the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the demographic contours and impact of the pestis secunda—the second wave of the Second Plague Pandemic—which ravaged England and Wales in 1361–62. The study is based on a rich corpus of statistical data deriving from manorial records—primarily court rolls, but also inquisitions postmortem and episcopal registers—on a national level. A close analysis of the data reveals that the wave in question tended to discriminate across regions, socioeconomic statuses, and genders. The study's findings are then considered within a wider context of ongoing historiographical debates related to the total size of the English population before and after the Black Death. It argues that the population size of England on the eve of the Black Death was higher than often argued, and that the impact of the pestis secunda was harsher than often assumed. The evidence suggests that it was the pestis secunda, rather than the Black Death, that had severe, long‐term demographic and socioeconomic repercussions for England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study seeks to identify signals of the male–female health‐survival paradox in medieval London. Materials and Methods: This study uses skeletal data on age, sex, dental caries (n = 592) and antemortem tooth loss (n = 819) from adult individuals from medieval London cemeteries (c. 1200–1540 CE). The association between age and dental caries was assessed using binary logistic regression. The associations among age, time period (pre‐ vs. post‐Black Death), oral biomarker (dental caries or antemortem tooth loss), and sex were tested using hierarchical log‐linear analysis. Results: The analyses reveal significantly higher odds of dental caries with increasing adult ages, more older adults after the Black Death, different age distributions of dental caries between the sexes, and a greater decrease in the prevalence of dental caries for females after the Black Death. These results appear not to be an artifact of trends in AMTL. However, this study does not yield evidence suggesting that females experienced both a survival advantage and a decline in oral health at late adult ages after the Black Death relative to males. Conclusions: These results do not provide evidence of the existence of a male–female health‐survival paradox, but they do corroborate existing evidence of improvements in health in general in the aftermath of the Black Death. The decreased prevalence of dental caries after the Black Death may reflect dietary improvements or the effects of selective mortality during the epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThough the world has witnessed many pandemics so far, this article historicizes the nexus between transportation and pandemics by taking four major pandemics human history has faced so far as representatives. Historically, the means of transportation are rapidly changing; from legs being the only kings on our streets to the fastest trains and aeroplanes, which have not only altered the world scenario but also have worked as the fastest vectors of pathogens. In this research, we have taken the ancient pandemic of Antonine Plague, the fourteenth-century pandemic of Black Death, the twentieth-century pandemic of Spanish Flu, and the most recent as well as the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 as the representative pandemics the human civilization has faced, and we have analyzed them in conversation with some insights from globalization vis-à-vis transportation and pandemics and some discourses from kinesthetic rhetoric keeping the issues of health and medicine in consideration. Our article concludes that with ever-growing means of transportation, it does not take a long time for a disease to become a pandemic. Therefore, it is an urgent call for human beings to understand the material persuasion of vehicular technologies and to work accordingly.

The contemplative reader of literature realizes that natural and social calamities, which inflict colossal sufferings on human beings, are best portrayed within its major genres. Examples of such calamities are wars, natural disasters and infectious diseases. In light of these critical circumstances, men of letters in general and playwrights in particular have not stood idly by. Rather, they found themselves more fervent to dramatize such calamities in their writings. William Shakespeare is the best to cite here. To everyone‘s surprise, Shakespeare composed most of his masterpieces during the quarantine period initiated by the "Plague" or ―Black Death,‖ which first struck England in the fourteenth century. Examples of Shakespeare‘s plague plays are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, besides many others. In one way or another, such plays bear some allusions to the traumatic anxieties and fears caused by the plague experience at that time. The present study is conducted to explore the traumatic impact of the Plague on Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet. It seems that almost every aspect in the fictitious world of Romeo and Juliet has been touched by the plague, both literally and symbolically. Throughout Romeo and Juliet, the reader could encounter only two scenes that explicitly mention or dramatize the plague. However, Shakespeare proves to be a skillful master in blinding the plague and quarantine themes into several symbolic and figurative motifs. Shakespeare could achieve this through employing a symbolic language saturated with traumatic plague allusions to account for the tragic endings of his characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of climate and disease as a major factor resulting in disruption and upheaval in the Turkic world in the 14th-15th centuries. The first issue the paper addresses is the beginning of the climatic downturn in circa 1280, which will ultimately culminate in the Little Ice Age of the late 15th-18th centuries. The paper cites recent work on the role of climate in the history of Iran. While the author has explored this issue in detail for the history of the Golden Horde, the impact of climate change on Iran in the 14th-15th centuries is a topic which has yet to be investigated adequately by historians. More importantly, climate change is associated with the spread of the Black Death, both in the original point of its spread and especially in the lower Volga River delta. The paper addresses the role of the Black Death (1346- ) as a disruptive factor in the history of the Golden Horde and the Chağatay Khanate. Citing recent research, it also considers legacy of the Black Death in the political, socio-economic, and cultural history of the Il-Khanate and what it meant for the rise of the Aqqoyunlu state. In the Golden Horde, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire, the Black Death led to a decline or disappearance in the earlier Islamic Turkic literary language. The earlier archair literary language was replaced by a newer literary language closer to the vernacular or spoken language of the people. There is also evidence of cultural responses to plague written in the new language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemplative reader of literature realizes that natural and social calamities, which inflict colossal sufferings on human beings, are best portrayed within its major genres. Examples of such calamities are wars, natural disasters and infectious diseases. In light of these critical circumstances, men of letters in general and playwrights in particular have not stood idly by. Rather, they found themselves more fervent to dramatize such calamities in their writings. William Shakespeare is the best to cite here. To everyone‟s surprise, Shakespeare composed most of his masterpieces during the quarantine period initiated by the "Plague" or “Black Death,” which first struck England in the fourteenth century. Examples of Shakespeare‟s plague plays are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, besides many others. In one way or another, such plays bear some allusions to the traumatic anxieties and fears caused by the plague experience at that time. The present study is conducted to explore the traumatic impact of the Plague on Shakespeare‟s Romeo and Juliet. It seems that almost every aspect in the fictitious world of Romeo and Juliet has been touched by the plague, both literally and symbolically. Throughout Romeo and Juliet, the reader could encounter only two scenes that explicitly mention or dramatize the plague. However, Shakespeare proves to be a skillful master in blinding the plague and quarantine themes into several symbolic and figurative motifs. Shakespeare could achieve this through employing a symbolic language saturated with traumatic plague allusions to account for the tragic endings of his characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enhance our knowledge about late-medieval epidemic outbreaks in specific parts of Eastern Central Europe. The first part on modern-day Eastern Germany discusses narrative evidence and its use in the current research on plague history, before bringing in municipal records on testaments and conveyances from Görlitz and Stralsund for the reconstruction of seasonality and mortality rates, as well as funeral inscriptions and pictorial evidence from Erfurt as indirect indicators of plague waves. After a brief discussion of the scarce narrative sources, the second part of the paper concerning Bohemia works with the evidence of the Libri Confirmationum, a source originating from the chancellery of the archbishops of Prague. Every new appointment to a benefice was supposed to be approved by one of the vicars general of the archbishop, and this confirmation usually gives the reason for the vacancy. Expanding on Eduard Maur’s research, death statistics and their frequency are analyzed statistically. The paper provides insight into new evidence for the reconstruction of plague waves, mortality rates and seasonality, and thereby highlights the characteristics of the plague in Eastern Central Europe.

Western scholarship has studied the mid-fourteenth-century cataclysm of the Black Death for centuries. In contrast, due to the limited number of contemporary narrative sources, in East Central Europe, until recently historians discussed it only marginally. In the past decades, not independent of the emergence of new methods, such as archaeogenetics and palynology, and novel approaches to studying the Black Death such as climate and environmental history, scholars have increasingly turned to the analysis of the multiple waves of the second plague pandemic in this region. Recent studies have drawn attention to the apparent lack of data on the Black Death in the region while pointing to the potential role of the later waves, such as the pestis secunda and tercia, as well as later medieval and early modern recurrences of the epidemic in the historical demography of Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. The paper provides an overview of the written evidence of the Black Death in Hungary and publishes in extenso some of the most important documentary evidence of the episodes of the epidemic in the Kingdom of Hungary. It argues that, unlike in the case of Bohemia and Poland, the first wave of the plague can be relatively well pursued by a critical analysis of the written evidence.

The article examines certain aspects of the social life of the City during the period of the plague (1348–1351) based on the documentation of the London Magistrate. It is shown that the Black Death dealt the most severe blow to the capital’s guilds, depriving them of workers and temporarily disorganizing production, which affected both the quality of manufactured products and relations inside trade and craft corporations, contributing to their further decline. Being unable to cope with the growth of social activity of journeymen, apprentices and servants, the masters were forced to appeal to the authority of the City administration, demanding from it the confirmation of previously established restrictive measures. Another important aspect of everyday life in London was overcoming such consequences of the crisis as the growth of crime and the restoration of shaken public mores, which were also fought through attempts at greater regulation and prohibitions. However, these measures did not bring tangible results.

This paper aims to enhance our knowledge about late-medieval epidemic outbreaks in specific parts of Eastern Central Europe. The first part on modern-day Eastern Germany discusses narrative evidence and its use in the current research on plague history, before bringing in municipal records on testaments and conveyances from Görlitz and Stralsund for the reconstruction of seasonality and mortality rates, as well as funeral inscriptions and pictorial evidence from Erfurt as indirect indicators of plague waves. After a brief discussion of the scarce narrative sources, the second part of the paper concerning Bohemia works with the evidence of the Libri Confirmationum, a source originating from the chancellery of the archbishops of Prague. Every new appointment to a benefice was supposed to be approved by one of the vicars general of the archbishop, and this confirmation usually gives the reason for the vacancy. Expanding on Eduard Maur's research, death statistics and their frequency are analyzed statistically. The paper provides insight into new evidence for the reconstruction of plague waves, mortality rates and seasonality, and thereby highlights the characteristics of the plague in Eastern Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western scholarship has studied the mid-fourteenth-century cataclysm of the Black Death for centuries. In contrast, due to the limited number of contemporary narrative sources, in East Central Europe, until recently historians discussed it only marginally. In the past decades, not independent of the emergence of new methods, such as archaeogenetics and palynology, and novel approaches to studying the Black Death such as climate and environmental history, scholars have increasingly turned to the analysis of the multiple waves of the second plague pandemic in this region. Recent studies have drawn attention to the apparent lack of data on the Black Death in the region while pointing to the potential role of the later waves, such as the pestis secunda and tercia, as well as later medieval and early modern recurrences of the epidemic in the historical demography of Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. The paper provides an overview of the written evidence of the Black Death in Hungary and publishes in extenso some of the most important documentary evidence of the episodes of the epidemic in the Kingdom of Hungary. It argues that, unlike in the case of Bohemia and Poland, the first wave of the plague can be relatively well pursued by a critical analysis of the written evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study explores the paleoepidemiology of the Black Death (1348–52 AD) mass graves from Hereford, England, via osteological analysis. Hereford plague mortality is evaluated in the local context of the medieval city and examined alongside other Black Death burials. Methods: The Hereford Cathedral site includes mass graves relating to the Black Death and a 12th‐16th century parish cemetery. In total, 177 adult skeletons were analyzed macroscopically: 73 from the mass graves and 104 from the parish cemetery. Skeletal age‐at‐death was assessed using transition analysis, and sex and stress markers were analyzed. Results: The age‐at‐death distributions for the mass graves and parish cemetery were significantly different (p = 0.0496). Within the mass graves, young adults (15–24 years) were substantially over‐represented, and mortality peaked at 25–34 years. From 35 years of age onwards, there was little variation in the mortality profiles for the mass graves and parish cemetery. Males and females had similar representation across burial types. Linear enamel hypoplasia was more prevalent within the mass graves (p = 0.0340) whereas cribra orbitalia and tibial periostitis were underrepresented. Conclusions: Mortality within the Hereford mass graves peaked at a slightly older age than is seen within plague burials from London, but the overall profiles are similar. This demonstrates that young adults were disproportionately at risk of dying from plague compared with other age groups. Our findings regarding stress markers may indicate that enamel hypoplasia is more strongly associated with vulnerability to plague than cribra orbitalia or tibial periostitis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peninsular Jewish community of the late medieval centuries is an object of study that can be approached from multiple perspectives, be it from the accusations towards it due to the Black Death, the monarchs’ need for money or the contempt of Christian debtors towards moneylenders hebrews. The events in the last few years of the XIV century constitute the culmination of an already existing violence and the dawn of what would happen at the end of the following century, the final moment of a difficult otherness that the converts were not able to wade through either.

Orta Çağ Hıristiyan toplumunda krizler, savaşlar, salgın hastalıklar, kıtlıklar Tanrı’nın bir gazabı olarak düşünülmekteydi. Bu tarz olumsuzluklarla karşı karşıya kalan insanlar, Tanrı’nın öfkesini yatıştırmak için çeşitli eylemlere başvuruyorlardı. XIII. ve XIV. yüzyılda Avrupa sokaklarına dökülen Kırbaççılar da, aynı içgüdü ile hareket etmekteydiler. Üst üste yaşadıkları felaketler neticesinde Tanrı’nın onları yok etmeye kararlı olduğuna inanmışlardı ve bedenlerini kırbaçlayarak bu sonun önüne geçmeyi, Tanrı’yı yatıştırmayı denediler. Ellerinde kırbaçlarla, yerel ilahiler eşliğinde şehirleri, kasabaları dolaştılar. Toplam otuz üç buçuk gün boyunca bedenlerini kırbaçla tedip ettiler. Ritüellerinde kanın özel bir yeri bulunmaktaydı ve bu kan Mesih’in kanını sembolize ediyordu. Ancak yerel otoriteler ve Papalık eylemlerini sakıncalı gördü ve yasakladı. XIV. yüzyıldaki eylemleri XIII. yüzyıla kıyasla daha fazla ses getirdi. Kırbaççılar XIV. yüzyılda radikalleştiler. Çalışmamızın amacı iki evre halinde tarih sahnesine çıkan Kırbaççıların ortaya çıkış serüvenlerini değerlendirmektir. Bu bağlamda çalışmamız XIII. ve XIV. yüzyılın sosyal tarihine konu üzerinden bir bakış açısı atmayı hedeflemektedir.

The present paper aims to reconstruct tentative ways, in which the Black Death (the first wave of the Second Plague Pandemic) spread from its now-established home in the Tian Shan region to Western Eurasia between c.1338/41 and 1346. On the basis of all the available evidence—textual, palaeogenetic, archaeological, topographic, numismatic and palaeoclimatalogical—the article argues for two phases of the plague spread: (1) the slow phase of c.1338/41–45, hindered by political and commercial crises in the Mongol Empire, but especially the Chaghadaid khanate, as well as by local environmental conditions and (2) the fast phase of 1345–6, once the plague reached the territories of the Golden Horde. As it will be argued, commercial networks, both long-distance and local, across long-distance trade routes (so-called 'Silk Roads') played a paramount role in facilitating the spread of the plague. Although not claiming to have solved the mystery of the westbound plague spread, the paper aims to provide a first full-scale study of this kind, raising new research questions and forming a starting point for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower‐paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth‐century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth‐century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of the Black Death, the economic consequences for laborers in our unfolding pandemic, COVID-19, might come as a surprise. Instead of labor shortages benefiting workers, especially the unskilled, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, our pandemic has sent economic inequality racing forward across the world with laborers' health and material well-being plummeting. However, a closer examination of the Black Death suggests that the consequences for labor of the two pandemics may not be as different as first assumed. This essay explores the silver lining for labor after the dramatic crash in population caused by the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century. By first turning to Europe as a whole and then concentrating on Italy, this essay challenges notions that labor conditions and standards of living improved immediately after the Black Death's halving of populations and that these changes were almost universal across Europe or even within city-states, such as Florence, or in rural areas hosting different sorts of agricultural workers. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the Black Death's silver lining for laborers failed to arrive until two or three generations after 1348. Moreover, compressing economic inequality from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries spurred reactions from elites that wrought new inequalities in other spheres of activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article focuses on the architecture of intersection that exists between emerging infectious diseases, conflict and global governance. Using COVID-19 as both the backdrop for a failed global response as well as a predictive exercise for future behaviours and attitudes. It follows a course not previously explored where contagion and conflict shape a future of calamity and insecurity. It explores how international relations uses domestic and geopolitical turbulences to infect and damage a coordinated response to the pandemic. This leads to mistrust and apathy towards any response of mitigation.

This article sets its investigative goal on determining the medical knowledge of medieval physicians from 1347-8 to 1351 concerning the causes of plague. As the plague killed a third of Europe’s population, the contemporary witness at the time perceived God as the sender of this plague to punish the human society. However, physicians separated the religious and cultural explanation for the cause of this plague and instead seek the answer to this question elsewhere. Developing on traditional medical knowledges, physicians classified the possible range of the plague’s causes into two areas: universal cause and individual/particular causes. In addition, they also sought to explain the causes by employing the traditional miasma-humoral theory. Unlike the previous ones, however, the plague during 1347-8 to 1351 killed the patients indiscriminately and also incredibly viciously. This phenomenon could not be explained by merely using the traditional medical knowledge and this idiosyncrasy led the physicians employ the poison theory to explain the causes of plague more pragmatically.

Recent historical and biological research on the Black Death in the Middle Ages has yielded new finds and spurred new questions. This article investigates how information about the plague in Rus' lands fits with these emerging paradigms. Building on foundational research by Lawrence N. Langer from the 1970s, the article investigates the origin of the plague in Rus' lands and its characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Black Death is represented visually in the Illustrated Chronicle Compilation (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod), a many-tomed account of the history of Russia compiled and lavishly illustrated at the court of Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s or 1570s. Illustrators and chroniclers depicted ordinary plague victims differently from those of high rank. Lofty individuals, like Grand Prince Semen Ivanovich and his sons, were shown apart from the mass deaths and their deaths were not explicitly attributed to plague. This may be because plague was understood as divine punishment. Nonetheless, the illustrations show the common humanity of plague victims. Illustrators also expressed an appreciation of the organic connections between human and natural spheres and the fragile relations between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Page 46, Line 2 from Below" presents itself as a part of an ongoing African Diasporan world, map and route making. A summoning of navigational instructions along the way. In this text, the navigational directions laid out in Dionne Brand's seminal A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) provide the space for the retelling of an unexpected encounter with name, place and memory. And while moving through the ebbs and flows of various time-spaces--Toronto, Mannheim, Elmina and Traiskirchen, a town close to the Austrian capital Vienna--memories of police violence and Black death, of resistance and imagining and ultimately of belonging wash up on its shores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The famous Moroccan traveller Muḥammad b. Baṭṭūṭa, who left Tangier in 1325, claims to have made a journey that took him across most of the then Islamicate world. The country in which he recounts having stayed the longest was India, where he says he remained from 1333 to 1341/1342, mostly in the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi. A long section of his Riḥla is dedicated to the sub-continent and modern historians of this region ascribe to it an important documentary value, although it has been argued that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have borrowed – not to imply copied – information from other sources in other parts of the work. As concerns India, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa speaks of two epidemics and one deadly disease that occurred in 1334–5 and 1344. Some scholars have referred to them as cholera, while others have suggested it was the plague – thus supporting the hypothesis that the medieval plague pandemic had struck India before reaching the Middle East. How did this confusion arise? What exactly does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla relate? Do Indo-Persian sources confirm these epidemics? Do they and/or Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla allow us to discount the presence of the Medieval Plague in India, or rather do they assert it? In order to answer these questions, this paper analyses the information on the Indian epidemics in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla and compares the text with its translations in the principal European languages and with Indo-Persian chronicles. These analyses reveal something of a lexical muddle which, in my opinion, has contributed to some errors and misunderstandings regarding the diseases in question. But another question arises: is it possible to read the information provided by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Indian chronicles in a consilient way, that is, taking into account not only the analysis of written documents, but also the recent and current findings in genetics of plague, and in particular on the Black Death? Finally, an attempt is made to answer a question that has to be asked, particularly in light of the criticism often levelled at Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Considering that in one of these events he claims to have witnessed the epidemic, is there any reason to suppose that he did not? Regarding the other two events that he did not claim to witness firsthand, is there any cause to doubt his claims? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scale of the rise in personal wealth following the Black Death calls the life-cycle hypothesis of consumption into consideration. Based on price level evidence, this paper shows for the first time that the wealth effect of the Black Death on economic activity continued in England for generations, up to 1450. Indeed, in the absence of consideration of the wealth effect, other influences on the price level do not even appear in the econometric analysis. The shift in tastes toward higher quality goods, luxuries and imports stemming from the per capita windfall for the survivors in the mid-fourteenth century plays a substantial part in the analysis. So does England's little influence on the relative prices of its imports relative to home goods. The separate effects of coinage, population, trade, wages and annual number of days worked for wages on the price level all also receive major attention and new results follow for adjustment in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode? This paper deconstructs the notion of consuming Black death in a loop (or repeat mode) online and its redistribution in the virtual realm centring the Black body in this pornotropic assemblage. The spectacularisation of Black death and its juxtaposition as a banal encounter is examined against the history of slavery and White oppression. The enactment of Blackness as lacking form or ontology redrafts the virtual sphere in enacting a politics of refusal for reconstituting Blackness adduced through its fluidity. The virtual as an unstable and disembodied realm is re-read as a generative graveyard for reclaiming Black consciousness and Black humanism. In countering the 'Black horrific' the paper discerns digital platforms' agentic and sensuous potential as a stage for performative insurgency to resurrect an affective Black body politic through the disembodied formlessness of the virtual sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is a construction reflecting contemporary sensibilities, and historical reconstruction is selective. The figure of Julian of Norwich is no exception to this construct. Few records detailing Julian of Norwich's life survive. Julian's anonymity makes the interpretation of her text more pliable, therefore driving her notoriety and allure. Julian's textual progeny includes not only editions, translations and versions of Shewings, but also critical and scholarly constructions built from the extant records of Julian's life. Review of scholarship about Julian shows that the works reflect standards of a particular time and offer different interpretations when read from various vantage points. The tendency to generate an amalgamation of medieval and progressive figure carries not only the potential for anachronism, it views the past through a contemporary socio-political lens. An appreciation of the medieval environment (cultural, physical, spiritual), alongside of a review of contemporary authors, can shed objective light on Julian's influences and aims. Review of historical documentation and contemporary criticism is essential to understanding the way others have constructed the medieval figure, how those constructions reflected attitudes endemic to the time and not Julian's, and how those misrepresentations were assumed fact and subsequently propagated by others. The author of Shewings has been described as a proto-Protestant, an early ecumenist, and a Catholic Modernist and, more recently, a radical and a proto-feminist; however, I argue that Julian's spiritual expressions, when placed in context, were orthodox and conformed to the acceptable limits of spiritual expression of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late antique plague has never been more contested. Recent scholarship has repeatedly questioned whether the Justinianic plague caused catastrophic mortality and supporters of the traditional narrative of a vast, depopulating sixth-century pandemic have dug in. Scholars have repeatedly assessed evidence thought to prove traditional narratives about the Justinianic plague, but never to everyone's liking. Things have gotten ugly and no resolution is in sight. To advance the debate and shift the focus, these pages review the use of the Black Death in accounts of the Justinianic plague. What follows demonstrates that the claim the sixth-century pandemic killed many millions is founded on centuries of uncritical treatment of late antique sources reinforced in recent generations via the overinterpretation of the first pandemic's plague diagnosis and the neglect of plague's ecological and epidemiological complexities. That the Justinianic plague was another Black Death underpins research agendas and influences the interpretation of data in diverse fields, but it is an unsubstantiated claim, one stemming from deficient interdisciplinarity and neither proven by current evidence nor provable with current methods. Only by strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration, it is proposed in closing, can we begin to remedy our first-pandemic plague problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left‐censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South‐East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North–South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]