Customer Reviews

King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England

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More professional historians should write books like this, and more publishers should encourage them to do so. King Death is well-written (no academic baffle-gab), well-illustrated, and well-designed. It is a joy to handle and read.

The subject of this book is the long-term consequences for English society of the Black Death. (If you are looking for an account of the plague itself, you should probably go elsewhere.) Colin Platt works his way through the effects on religion, economy, marriage and family in topical chapters.

The general reader will get a lot out of it -- will come away with a much greater knowledge of later medieval England and of the effects of population trends on society. I suspect many scholars will find this a useful book, too. This is not a rehash of long-known material, but a study that's as up-to-date as it is accessible.

Colin Platt gives an excellent, IN-DEPTH review of scholarship surrounding the impact of the Black Death on late-medieval England, full of original contributions to the field. His chapters are well thought-out and well documented. Some, especially the chapters on church art, are very moving; others, such as the chapter on widows made wealthy by the plague, will force the reader to reconsider their views on literature contemporary to the plague (and here I am thinking of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" in particular). If you're looking for stories of gruesome death, well, perhaps this is not the first place to look (although there's still plenty of that here). If, on the other hand, you're looking for a more in-depth look at the plague and what it did to the societies it infected, here's the place to come when you've tired of the gruesome bits.

This piece came to my attention while conducting research for a thesis on the Black Death. Unfortunately, Platt's work is really only designed for British Historians. While he does recount how resurgence of bubonic plague in late-medieval England affected the country's economic and labor systems, he does so without consistancy. The bulk of this text provides overly detailed examinations of how the plague spread between specific towns and counties, with only minimal, and rather sporadic, discussion of how society as a whole reacted to the epidemic. Again, this work will not give you a holistic viewpoint of how the plague interacted with social, cultural, medical, etc factors of the day. Its only use is to those who wish to understand, in depth, how the labor system of late-medieval England changed due to the fluctuating mortality rates.

This book is indeed scholarly but to whom? Much of the data is concerning useless facts. It is not intended to inform of the Black Death as I thought it would. There are no scientific facts written; only boring useless facts of land ownerships and church renovations and construction. I have gained nothing from this book.