Book Notes: The Great Mortality by John Kelly
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly, is interesting and readable and contains a myriad details about life during the plague and during the 14th century generally. It is written in a popular history style with a certain amount of speculation and broad generalizations. As other reviewers have noted, it suffers from some repetition, with the model being something like,
On such-and-such a day, the plague first entered such-and-such town, this person died, that person died, and in the end 50% of the population died, though some scholars say it was only 35% and some say 60% and all these estimates are to be taken with caution.
However, there is plenty of factual detail about the plague, its causes, the things people tried in order to prevent it or avoid it, the way it was assimilated into and shaped their worldview. There are many, many anectdotes about individuals, mostly interesting though sometimes straying from the topic. The biggest contribution to my own knowledge was the fact that there was such severe persecution against the Jews specifically over the plague.
One weakness of the book, I felt, was the author’s strong tendency to personify the plague bacterium. This is, of course, a reasonable literary device but sometimes it went so far that it seemed explanations of events were being given in terms of the (dasterdly) intentions of Yersinia pestis. Also, biological science is not the book’s strong point, so do not go looking here for that (for example, “antigens” are confused with “antibodies”, and the author says, “its ragged genetic structure certainly suggests an agent slapped together in a hurry to meet an evolutionary emergency” because the organism has “a great many non-functioning genes and three ungainly plasmids.”)
All in all, a good, interesting read with a wealth of information about a topic with which moderns should be more familiar — who knows when we will need to face a similar situation?
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, by John Kelly(****)