The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year
Notes to Pages 7–8• 305
- There are interesting comparisons of Venetian responses with those at Milan in
William Naphy and Andrew Spicer,The Black Death: A History of Plagues, 1345 – 1730
(Gloucestershire, 2000 ), 35 – 36.
- Ann G. Carmichael, “Plague Legislation in the Italian Renaissance,”Bulletin of
the History of Medicine 57 ( 1983 ): 511.
- Horrox,The Black Death, 234 – 35.
- An excellent analysis of Italian evidence for plague, along with a discussion of
other diseases like smallpox, influenza, and dysentery that may also have appeared in
epidemic form, sometimes with plague, is Ann G. Carmichael,Plague and the Poor in
Renaissance Florence(New York, 1986 ), esp. ch. 1 , “Recurrent Epidemic Diseases: Plague
and Other Plagues.” For northern Europe, see Edward A. Eckert, “Plague and Other
Pestilences,” in The Structure of Plagues and Pestilences in Early Modern Europe: Central
Europe, 1560 – 1640 (Basel, 1996 ), ch. 6 , and A. Lynn Martin,Plague? Jesuit Accounts of
Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century(Kirksville, Mo., 1996 ), 1 – 20.
- Horrox,The Black Death, 13.
- Samuel K. Cohn Jr.,The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early
Renaissance Europe(London, 2002 ), and Cohn, “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm,”
American Historical Review 107 ( 2002 ): 715 – 35 , emphasize alterations in the nature of
plague during this pandemic. See epilogue, “Of Once and Future Plagues,” this volume.
- Rosemary Horrox poses the question “whether the regularity of subsequent out-
breaks [after the Black Death] allowed familiarity to breed contempt, or whether (as
most modern writers seem to assume) plague remained uniquely terrifying.” She con-
cludes: “In the cultural arena it is now more widely recognized that people under pres-
sure are likely to articulate their anxieties in ways which are already familiar to them,
and that cultural continuities spanning the plague cannot therefore be taken as evidence
for the insignificance of those anxieties, or of the upheaval which triggered them.”
Horrox,The Black Death, 13 , 236. Paul Slack, while contrasting the effects of plague in
1347 as a new disease with its later visitations, notes that these events were “important
landmarks in the annals of local societies... Their effects were recorded in diaries
and chronicles, and each successive ‘great plague’ or ‘great pestilence’ was used as a nat-
ural point of reference until its place was usurped by the next epidemic year.” Slack,
“Mortality Crises and Epidemic Disease in England, 1485 – 1610 ,” in Charles Web-
ster, ed.,Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century(Cambridge, 1979 ), 9.
For a contrary view that European culture became optimistic about living with plague,
rather than traumatized by its repeated epidemics, see Cohn, “The Black Death,”
705 – 10.
- Vivian Nutton, “Medieval Western Europe, 1000 – 1500 ,” in Lawrence I. Conrad,
Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, eds.,The Western Medical
Tradition, 800 BCtoAD 1800 (Cambridge, 1995 ), 191. A superb assessment of the dem-
ographic and economic effects in England is John Hatcher,Plague, Population, and the
English Economy, 1348 – 1530 (London, 1977 ), including his “Introduction to the Contro-
versy,” 11 – 20.
- For the entire scope of the second pandemic, see Biraben,Les hommes et la peste,
