Customer Reviews

From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages

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This book is great!! I used it to write my final for my Western civilizations class in college. It was on the Black Death, and the Hundred Year's war. It had lots of great info on those subjects. I recommend this book highly for school, or fun.

The book is not an ornate description of the late middle ages. Rather it attempts to seive data into an outline of what life might have been at the time. At times the data, which should have taken the form of footnotes, becomes the body of the text. Fortunately, this does not happen often. The "Plague" section is a bit amiss with outstreached consequences of the plague, but is nonetheless revealing: I, for one, learned that there were 3 kinds of plagues, the bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic rather than a single sweeping disease. Aberth contends that the Plague claimed more victims than the standard 1/3 demographic decline figure. All in all there is plenty here for a medievalist to keep themselves entertained. I would also recomend, perhaps, reading this in conjunction w/ the video series written and hosted by Simon Schama "A History of Britain".