Customer Reviews

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

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2 star:		(46)
1 star:		(92)

 

 

I have never understood why Norman Cantor seems to think the public only wants the "movie version" of history instead of the real thing. But the movie version -- including outdated ideas, sensational assertions and gross misunderstandings -- is what this is. After reading this book -- which, fortunately, I didn't pay full price for -- I am happy to see from the reviews posted here that others have spotted its many flaws.

Quite a few people who come to this book WITHOUT much background in medieval history or medicine find it fascinating, and feel they have learned a lot about history from it -- though admittedly it's also rambling, repetitious, VERY poorly edited and sometimes difficult to keep track of. (I'll second all those criticisms but won't address them here.)

On the other hand, people who actually KNOW something about biology, anthropology, genetics, epidemiology, demographics or material culture will be brought up short by Cantor's sloppy thinking and downright inexcusable ignorance.

One reviewer comments, "Cantor's research for this tome must have been incredibly extensive, since he provides excruciating details for every topic..." But in fact, it's those very fascinating details that are often wrong. Just about any time I found myself saying "Wow, I never knew THAT," it turned out later that Cantor was wrong. For instance, he clearly didn't even bother to verify his facts on the old "Ring Around the Rosy" legend -- check it out on the Urban Legends Reference Pages; the song seems to hve come into existence in the 1880s.

As for demographics, he confuses the statistics on life expectancy badly, saying that a modern actuary would have given the 15-year-old Princess Joan "just about ten years to live", based on an *average* life expectancy of 25. This is highly misleading, because the highest death rates were among children under 5 -- if you made it to age 20 (only about two-thirds of the children born actually did), you could expect to live at least into your 50s, even under the appalling sanitary conditions of the time. And Joan was a princess. relatively well cared for and well nourished, and might have lived even longer. King Edward I lived to be 68; Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) lived to be 82.

He also asserts that men might be on their third or fourth marriage by age 45, ignoring the fact that women of that age might almost equally well be on their third or fourth husband. The tendency for women to die in childbirth is nearly balanced by men's tendency to die in wars, brawls, or hunting accidents.

His carelessness about material culture is at least as great. He perpetuates the myth of the Great Unwashed by asserting that people didn't "bathe" -- they may well not have immersed themselves completely in water, but at least the upper and middle classes washed their bodies regularly (a sponge bath and a good rinse), changed their underwear frequently, and swept their floors daily. He regularly gets clothes wrong: women did not wear "corsets" in the 1300s, and also a velvet altar frontal is not a "vestment," nor would it be used ON the altar. (Vestments are clothing, cloths ON the altar are always linen.)

The real problem, though, is that Cantor apparently hasn't figured out how to write competently for a lay audience. He seems to think the public only wants the "movie version" of history. I've read several of his other books, and his textbooks -- where he's not trying to be breezy or topical, or to air his sometimes crochety opinions of modern life -- are fine. His _Medieval Lives_, on the other hand, is terrible: it's at least as sloppy and filled with errors as this is. The worst parts are where he's trying to be funny.

I read William Manchester's _A World Lit Only by Fire_ perhaps seven or eight years ago, when I knew less than I do now, and found I think nine errors of fact in its first dozen pages. And I don't have a PhD, just a good liberal arts college degree. In a morbid way, it's amusing to hear THAT book praised as better than this one. Perhaps that IS an accurate assessment.

I have rarely read such a poorly edited book. The text is extremely repetitious. Points are strung across lengthy asides about people and their obscure lineages which make throughline often hard to follow. Large claims are constantly made about the impact of the plague that the text did not remotely back up.

In addition, there are frequent stray references to men being gay which are usually tangential to the argument, and even a section that verges perilously on blaming Jews for their own persecution which I found offensive despite 1) not being Jewish and 2) being extremely chary of the Political Correctness brigade.

The only really useful point is that anthrax was probably as important a factor as the bubonic one, but that point is made long before the halfway point. Beyond that, I learned nothing of value that was not in Barbara Tuchman's masterful A DISTANT MIRROR. With his imposing credentials, I am sure Cantor has done great work in the past, but this particular book is a major dud -- as much as I hate to say this about anything an author put work into, this book is, sadly, not worth the money.

This book reads more like a collection of randomly assembled notes than a historical treatise. The narrative wanders over more than a millennium and tries to embrace cultural, religious, and biomedical history within the space of 200 pages. It does not succeed in any aim. I was frankly astounded that the author, who enjoys a good reputation as a historian of the Medieval period, would put his name to such a poorly executed effort.

This was not worth the time nor the money.

First off, the title of this book should be "The Progress of the Plague in England" since the book focuses almost entirely on England with at best brief references to other countries and parts of Europe, except when discussing the persecution of the Jews where his focus quite reasonably excludes England. The Jews had been expelled from England before the plague, or I'm sure that section would have talked only about Jews in England.

He does a reasonable job of giving you an idea of how great the scope of the catastrophe was, assuring us repeatedly that 40% of the population was killed. But oddly at the end, he then tries to argue that European society was changed little or not at all by the massive, society-shaking catastrophe of the plague. Oh, except that it is the reason the Plantagenets lost the 100 year's war. But nothing else that happened in the immediate aftermath was in any way related to the plague. Yeah, right.

Throw in some wild and absurd speculations - scientific progress that occured in the 17th and 18th centuries would have occured in the 14th if only the plague hadn't occured (from the chapter Death Comes To the Archbishop) and the plague was caused not by rats from infected ships but by a barrage of particles from comets (from the chapter Serpents and Cosmic Dust) - and you are likely to come away embarassed to admit that you took anything in the book seriously.

You'll get more and better history from a decent introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales than you will from this book.

I'm truly sorry to have spent as much as I did on this book. It does contain quite a lot of information, yes, but it's organized so poorly and written in such awkward prose that its impact is severely diminished. I was particularly annoyed that a medievalist of such reputation didn't do a little more research on the "Ring around a rosy" rhyme, but confidently states the old myth about its origins as fact. ....

In short,I'd say that you're much better off rereading Tuchman than buying this book, unless you collect interesting jacket art.

I found that while Dr. Cantor's book offers a good starting point for those interested in the plague, especially the plague years of the 14 century, his book jumps too randomly from subject to subject to be easily understood. The author does include several interesting points as he moves through his scattered thoughts. Points like the idea that the plague may have in fact been several diseases not merely one. However, Dr. Cantor does not explore these ideas with any depth or vigor. He merely glosses over them. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the book is the gross errors in chapter nine. There he sites "Grant Johannson" as the discoveror of the 2.5 million year old human from Africa. As an anthropologist let me just say that I'm sure Dr. Donald Johannson appreciates the effort made to get both his name and the age of his find correct. Also the footprints found by Mary Leaky at Laetoli are not a human and a horse but an adult and a juvenile. Neither of these finds involve "humans", that is to say humans like you or Dr. Cantor. They constitute Hominids, which is something VERY VERY different. Upon reading this chapter, I found myself doubting the validity of much of Dr. Cantor's scholarship. If he could misconstrue two of the most famous and, frankly, well-known discoveries of paleoanthropology, what else could he get wrong? Let me simply say, get your facts correct or don't write on the subject.

Cantor strikes a populist direction with this book. He affects a breezy writing style (one can easily imagine much of his writing as a spoken, off-the-cuff lecture punctuated by more-or-less amusing asides, some of which totally derail his train of thought), the book is short (only 220 pages of text) and there is not a single footnote. The obvious comparison in terms of subject matter is to Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Tuchman made a best seller from her remarkable approach in spite of her scholarly writing-style. Cantor's book lacks that sophistication of approach, and is further marred, as other reviewers have already noted, by too much repetition, too many asides, too much unsupported speculation, too many inconsistencies, and too many factual errors. There is some merit to the book, but its flaws far outweigh its worth.

Cantor at his best cites an interesting theory: that the Black Death was not a single disease, but two or more--not bubonic plague alone, but also some cattle-borne disease such as a particularly virulent form of anthrax. Supporting this theory are the Black Death's infestation of Iceland, an isolated island not known to have rats until the 17th Century, the often extremely rapid course of the disease--faster than that of bubonic plague; the lack of typical bubonic plague symptoms in many victims; the evidence that cattle were ravished by the Black Death; and the continued virulence of the plague in winter months when flea hosts would not normally live. The theory is not Cantor's own, but he has researched and supported it in convincing fashion. Less adequate is Cantor's chapter "Heritage of the African Rifts", which discusses the three pandemics of smallpox, gonorrhea, and plague and places their origin in "the great mortality chute from East Africa. Certainly that is where the bubonic plague came from after A.D. 500." But in his bibliography Cantor cites William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and says, contradicting his own earlier statement written with such certainty, "McNeill thought the Mongols, their migrations and conquests, were a key to plague history; there may be something in that."

Also of interest, but clearly quirky, was Cantor's chapter on various speculations on the true cause of the Black Death. "Serpents and Cosmic Dust" covers alternative explanations for the "biomedical catastrophe" from the medieval to the present, focusing on two suggestions: the first, that snakes were the carriers; the second, that plague came from outer space. Cantor is kind, although not entirely enthusiastic, about these speculations: at one point he says "It is just possible that medieval writers who placed the origins of the Black Death in serpents dispensing plague as they swam up rivers were on to something." Unfortunately, the only "evidence" he offers is that another historian on an unrelated issue once took medieval writers at their word in the face of academic thought and has since been vindicated. The argument in favor of the cosmic dust theory is basically that it was proposed by eminent astrophysicist Fred Hoyle--what is not mentioned is Hoyle's second career as a well-known science fiction writer. Hoyle's is a fascinating speculation, which only the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence can currently support.

Cantor mentions one fascinating fact in this chapter that needed to be explored much further: plague was not widespread in Poland and Bohemia. This has been explained "by the rats' avoidance of these areas due to the unavailability of food the rodents found palatable." This seems unlikely --elsewhere Cantor points out the relative agricultural wealth of Poland and the Ukraine. Could Polish grain really be considerably different than Western European grain--and what of the anthrax theory, which would have the disease unaffected by the rodent's diet?

Socio-cultural differences between Poland and Bohemia and the rest of Europe would make an ideal testing ground for those theories concerning the effect the Black Death had on society, the arts, and religion. But rather than do any original research comparing plague-ridden and plague-free areas, Cantor merely launches into various criticisms of his colleagues' work in his final chapter, "Aftermath". Cantor examines these theories and subjects them to a much less forgiving critique than the far wilder speculations mentioned previously. Some of these attacks are odd indeed, such as critiquing a book published in 1919! This is the most poorly written and argued part of the entire book, and honestly I cannot tell to what conclusion Cantor comes-whether the Black Death did or did not have any profound effect beyond killing off certain talented individuals.

Finally, the outright errors. Rather than repeat those caught by other reviewers, I'll discuss the extraordinary apparent claim of time-travel. Cantor recounts the story of the le Strange/Talbot family. Richard Talbot inherited the la Strange estate from the dowager Mary upon her "dying in 1396." (Whether this was a plague-related death Cantor apparently deems unimportant.) Later in the chapter we are told "Richard Talbot, newly enriched by the le Strange fortune, got his father out of debtor's prison and the old soldier died of the plague in 1387 in Spain..." How could Richard have paid his father's debts with money he wouldn't receive for nine more years? I cannot account for the chronology of events without either contemplating a typographical error, a rift in the space-time continuum, or a mis-informed or deeply confused author. Hopefully it is the former, and Mary died ten years earlier than Cantor reports; but I am left with the discomforting concern that the dates are correct and Cantor simply speculated on Talbot's source of funds. Unfortunately this is not an isolated error.

While Cantor's book is more up-to-date than Barbara Tuchman's is, I can't recommend it, even as a supplement. It is too deeply flawed on too many levels. I'm left to wonder if some horrible computer virus didn't work its way through the manuscript, decimating the writing and killing at least 40% of the ultimate value of the book. As Cantor says, "It is just possible."

The author obviously knows his subject, and the book contains many fascinating tidbits. But the writing style and editing is so poor that much of the book's value is lost in the jumble. The first several chapters read like college course lecture notes strung together. The last several chapters include repetitions which should have been edited out. The efforts to explain family relationships and inheritances are convoluted and could have been stated more clearly with a little effort. Some of the claims Cantor makes about the results of the plague are far-fetched, and his supporting evidence does not bear them out. He also makes some very broad generalizations, such as claiming that nobility in the 14th century never thought deeply even though they read philosophical works and supported the arts. Surely there were a few thoughtful nobles! In all, a disappointment.

This book reads like it was written on a deadline without any serious research. Don't be intimidated by the 230 pages. The large font and small pages disguise the fact that it is little more than a brochure. In the early pages the reader gets hints that it will be a wide-ranging review of causes and consequences of the great European plague of 1348. Suggestions that the labor shortage created when 40% of the population perished led to the destruction of ossified social institutions and paved the way for the Renaissance while fundamentally changing land ownership patterns and the Catholic church. Now that would have been an interesting book.

Unfortunately, it's not this book. The next chapter is little more than an ad-libbed 33-page anti-royalty sermon. The English Princess Joan dies of plague in Bordeaux on her way to Spain. The book's peculiar approach to this event is not to separate and examine the historical strands of consequence so much as to provide an outlet for a strange loathing for medieval nobility. "Joan was a top-drawer white girl, a European princess"; "Most kings filled their roles weakly and uneasily, like third-rate actors playing Hamlet on road circuit in the boondocks"; "Three flunkies of the royal household were dispatched to purvey (that is, extort) food from Devon". Two pages describing Joan's baggage and another four on chapels that English nobles built for themselves. No depth, just a silly down-with-the-crown sensibility while discussing nothing but a string of English kings, and even then without drawing any connections to the plague.

Next come long bios of two Oxford intellectuals, both interesting fellows, but there is no serious analysis of consequences, just that they were smart and they died of the same disease. Like the review of Aquinas' Aristotelian theology and the sad story of Edward Hastings, it's all sort of interesting, but it doesn't have much to do with the plague. The only strong chapter is the discussion of pogroms against Jews in plague-afflicted countries that ultimately led to large Jewish communities in Poland and Ukraine.

The cynical style and lazy disregard for facts can be grating. The book never misses a chance to call someone gay, to stick in pointless factoids about wine, oddly to call the Nile the "great mortality chute" while confusing the direction of its flow. In chapter two, we read that one theory, "a minority opinion", suggests that the 1348 plague was combined with an anthrax outbreak. By chapter eight, we are assured that there is "consensus" that anthrax was involved. Or the throwaway comment that the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 "on their way to Bosnia" - not only had the Ottomans defeated the Serbs in Kosovo in 1389, but Constantinople wasn't captured on the way to anything, it was the crown jewel of their conquests.

The shame of it is that readers won't come away knowing much more about the plague and its consequences than they did before. There is still a gap on the shelf for a good book on the topic. "In The Wake of the Plague" is unsatisfying - a sore disappointment

Let me start by quoting an example of Cantor's (shudder) prose from page 13:

"Even if this were true, which is not likely, it would not account for the disappearance of the plague, because the disease can be carried by any rodent and, today's scientists believe, by cats, of which there were plenty in the eighteenth century."

Now there technically isn't anything wrong with this sentence apart from an irritatingly clunky style combined with punctuation to set your teeth on edge. The trouble is the book goes on and on like this with sentences that make you wonder if English is Cantor's second language.

You also get baffling assertions like (page 17):

"The diachronic is the historical narrative, horizontally developing through time: "Tell me a story."
...
Today, however, we have scientific -- or synchronic -- means of analysis."

Huh? Do historians really use diachronic and synchronic in this way? And pray, what is "horizontally developing through time"?

The most important piece of advice I can give is don't let children see this book: it will corrupt their writing skills.