| Daily Life During the Black Death Joseph P. Byrne (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2006), 344 pages Reviewed by: John St. Lawrence, University of Texas at Austin New technology and the threats posed by new diseases spark continued interest in the Black Death, a central Asian disease that broke into Western Europe in the mid-1300's and lingered for centuries in some places, reducing that continent’s population by around half. The political, religious, and economic consequences of the Black Death’s ravages occupy a fundamental place in the study of early modern Europe, as a reduced population’s transformed political dynamic attempted to replace demolished certainties. Joseph Byrne attempts to bring to the general reader the nature of daily life under the Black Death, apparently as a follow up to the author’s previous work on this subject for The Greenwood Press, The Black Death. As the author himself observes, however, the task of portraying quotidian existence through the lens of upheaval necessarily pulls the author in contrary directions. Byrne uses familiar secondary works on the Black Death and its fallout, contemporary illustrations, and contemporary accounts in translation to present the world of the pre-modern West turned upside-down. The book is organized into areas of life rather than the periods affected by the Black Death or its geography. Students interested in a particular region, therefore, must continually resort to the index. Readers interested in a particular period need to look elsewhere entirely. Byrne explains medieval practices with ancient authors, confuses disparate and even antagonistic branches of religious organizations, and approaches early modern events such as the Reformations as foregone conclusions rather than the outcome of medieval antecedents. Where Byrne succeeds is in summarizing the challenges of policing the plague in the early modern lowlands and the Italian peninsula. Chapters on the Pest House, City Hall, and the impact of the Black Death in the Medieval Muslim world bring together much that will be new to most readers. It is in this historiography that the author clearly feels more comfortable since, with the exception of the Islamic world, this is his main area of research. For this reason, unfortunately, the book’s center of gravity lies almost three centuries after the arrival and greatest impact of the Black Death. In places, furthermore, even this later material suffers from underdevelopment as Byrne fails either to provide or to cite historical arguments that support his sweeping generalizations. For instance, the author hints that the stresses of the Black Death were an opportunity for the transformation of political authority but does not develop this line of argument as, for example, Daniel Raff has done in his Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and New. The Greenwood Press describes its Daily Life Through History series as a “curriculum related series ... unique in giving students a wealth of details about daily life, based on current scholarship, that is not available elsewhere.” But, in the case of Byrne’s work, most of the information on the Black Death actually is available elsewhere and the material present in the book does not prove particularly useful to students. The book, unfortunately, suffers from an extreme lack of citations, even for a popularizing work. When Byrne summarizes the recent debates both in the historical and medical communities on the bubonic plague and whether it was the disease we now blame for the Black Death, any student or specialist interested in learning more on the subject will be disappointed to find that Byrne provides only a single endnote, and that to a work nearly forty years old. Byrne’s 300 pages are accompanied by just over seven pages of bibliography. Works on daily life are not necessarily doomed to disappoint the specialist, as John Arnold has shown with his recent Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe. Instead it is the author’s own execution that ensures that Daily Life During the Black Death is unappealing as a popularizing work and one that will frustrate students while offering little if anything to the specialist. |
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