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    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
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    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
    Unavailable
    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

    Written by John Kelly

    Narrated by Matthew Lloyd Davies

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    About this audiobook

    La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history-a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781977381354
    Author

    John Kelly

    John Kelly, who holds a graduate degree in European history, is the author and coauthor of ten books on science, medicine, and human behavior, including Three on the Edge, which Publishers Weekly called the work of ""an expert storyteller."" He lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Great Mortality

    4/5

    402 ratings45 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Well written, well researched, and well read! I very accessible bit of history.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting and comprehensive look at the Black Death, and it’s spread across the world. Narrator was very engaging. Recommend as an entry piece to anyone curious and looking for somewhere to start.
    • 5/5
      Kelly explains the plague in incredible detail, I learned more about the plague from this book than any other reading I've done on the subject.
    • 3/5
      The issue, for me, is the narration—uneven and theatrical. The voice will go from expressively loud to whisper-soft and inaudible (especially if you have any ambient noise). This variation occurs within a phrase or two. I may try the actual book, as I think the content is worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Like the book overall. Loved the small personal stories of individuals, and what happened to them during the plague. The author overall hit on the major points of this historic event. This author definitely had his dislike of the church. He wrote that overall the church came out, looking very badly during the plague. That is true to some extent. However, I have also read other various accounts of the church going through great acts to support and die for their flock. It’s interesting, but this offer didn’t include any of those stories.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the book for the most part, BUT the author makes a number of mistakes and troubling judgements:
      - cultural differences exist, but the ugly characterization of all Sicilians is despicable and ridiculous
      - he mischaracterizes Boccaccio’s character / premise in a way that makes me question whether he even read it, or an assistant just looked it up on Wikipedia
      - the tone of his sweeping and “lyrical” exposition might be considered cheeky by his fellow countrymen, but often comes off as callous and flip
      - broken windows theory has been comprehensively debunked as the racist bunk it is, and his use of it here is inappropriate and uninformed
      - his chauvinistic preening about English resilience is lacking in academic rigor
      - a number of his assertions, such as hygiene in the Middle Ages, have been challenged by modern research, and reveal the author’s lack of specific expertise and/or disinterest in academic rigor
      - he picks out “fun” stories to set the scene I suppose in various localities, but these are often irrelevant and occur over 100+ years from the events in question

      Needless perhaps to say, but I won’t be repeating any of the “facts” in this book, without researching thoroughly elsewhere.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating stuff, and well and humanely written. Really glad this was recommended to me.
    • 5/5
      Kelly explains the plague in incredible detail, I learned more about the plague from this book than any other reading I've done on the subject.
    • 4/5
      The author addresses the plight of each Europe as a whole, instead of only one country. The reader begins with a chapter on how the disease attacks the body, the three types and how it is spread. Then a timeline of how he disease crossed Europe, examining each country in turn. The author also covers the political drama, horrific Jewish persecutions, the Flagellant movement and natural disasters (earthquakes, flooding) that occurred simultaneously with the Black Death. It is still debated today as to why the Black Death devastated the human population to such an immeasurable extent in the 14th c, and why at that particular time. Kelly seems to be in favor of Nature's far-reaching and corrective hand. The human population was booming and the opportunistic rodent populations essentially bred themselves into a "Malthusian pruning mechanism." I'm not sure I'm in agreement, but the author provides an excellent argument.Food for thought:"Technological innovation that included the horse collar, the carruca plow, the watermill and the windmill increased agricultural productivity, thus a population boom and protective, isolating forests came down.""In the later Middle Ages death...was seen as the moment at which the individual...took stock of the meaning of life...The plague pit was the antithesis of this idea: it made death anonymous, casual, and left the individual unrecognizable.""Many people seem to have died not because they had a particularly virulent case of the plague, but because the individuals who normally cared for them were either dead or ill...The farmers who grew the food and those who carted it into the city were also being decimated by plague."There are parts that could've been trimmed, but overall an easy read and an excellent starter for anyone learning about the Black Plague.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating and in-depth look of the Black Plague that swept through Constantinople, Asia Minor, North Africa, and all of Europe in the 14th Century. It seemed fitting to read it now in 2021, in part to remind myself that we've been here before, and to understand more of what went on way back then.Kelly does a phenomenal job with explaining where the Plague came from, which rodent on the plains of Mongolia carried the flea, and how there were really two kinds of Plague: pneumonic and Bubonic. I had no idea. He also uses contemporary sources as a way to point out that what was "every living soul" in medieval writing was, in truth, closer to 30 percent or 40 percent and why. Because there were different death rates in different areas.And how the plague spread from Mongolia through trade routes (think: bags, packs, pack animals, minimal hygiene) to Caffa on the Black Sea, and then from there to Constantinople. Again, the hyperbole of "everyone on board the ship was dead when it was in port" gets a modern historical review. The amount of death and destruction, though, is immense. Town by town and city by city he leads us, up water routes and across land routes, and writings by those who survived and those who didn't. Also part of the history are the economic and ecological disasters that happened in different parts of Europe; England was especially hard hit with torrential rains that resulted in widespread famine 20 years before the Plague, with resulting lowered immune systems of the children who survived the famine only to die so quickly of the Plague.What kept me from giving this book the full 5 stars was the author's commentary and interjections of "he must have thought" and occasional pulling together of threads that too jumbled to make a great deal of sense.
    • 4/5
      In the midst of our pandemic, I decided to read about the granddaddy of all pandemics -- the Black Death of the Middle Ages, that wiped out somewhere around half the population of many areas it touched.As I listened, I found my brain making strange connections between then and now. For instance, conspiracy theories flourished. People behaved in counterproductive ways. There were other things that struck me, but my retention of details isn't as good as it used to be. It was an interesting book. I could have been happy with few less details about rats and fleas . . . He spent a lot of time putting things in context, sometimes with details that caused me to lose the train of thought. It was important that he pointed out the persecution of the Jewish people during the plague (conspiracy theory was that they caused the plague!) but a history of anti-Semitism from the time of the Gospel accounts through Nazi Germany seemed a bit out of place -- that could be a book in and of itself.
    • 3/5
      This is the most accessible of the plague histories I’ve been reading recently. The book jacket describes author John Kelly as a “storyteller”, and that’s pretty accurate; Kelley intersperses his narrative with vignettes, like describing feelings of a couple who die together in their peasant hut and the anguish of a shoemaker who has to bury his wife and five children with his own hands to keep them out of a plague pit. While this makes the book very readable, Kelly is not particularly careful to distinguish between events that can be documented from contemporary records and scenes he’s making up for narrative effect. He covers a greater time period then the actual plague years, fitting the plague into the larger context by discussing the destruction of the Templars, the Avignon Papacy, and the Hundred Years War. In this way, The Great Mortality is reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, which also covers the 14th century.Kelly also owes a lot to Ole Benedictow’s The Black Death, including copying Benedictow’s slightly annoying habit of referring to the plague as a conscious entity. Kelly is also very much on Benedictow’s side in believing that the plague was caused by Yersina pestis, and devotes a whole chapter to a pro-and-con discussion of various alternate theories - pulmonary anthrax, an Ebola-type hemorrhagic fever, and an unknown “Disease X”. He does not, however, agree with Benedictow’s belief that plague mortality approached 75%, sticking with the more traditional 25-30%.
      No maps or other illustrations, but a pretty good bibliography. Not a bad choice for an introduction to the plague years and the 1300s in general.
    • 3/5
      Having read a couple of historical fiction novels with the Black Death aka the Great Mortality as the book’s backdrop, I picked this book up to read to understand this apocalyptic-like event. Between the years of 1346 and 1353, the Black Death creeped across Eurasia, initially along major trade routes and later inland, killing one-third of the area’s population.I had to slog through the initial chapters that described the plague cause, Yersinia pestis and its vector, the rat flea, which were carried on rodents such as rats and marmots. However, after this introduction, the author communicated the impact of the pandemic, chapter by chapter as the plague spreads east to west and south to north.Lacking knowledge of today’s epidemiological studies, a panicked mankind behaved in irrational behaviors including the extermination of groups of people thought to be the cause of the disease, including Jews, lepers and gypsies. Others, believing this calamity to be the act of a vengeful God, hoped to atone for their sins through self-flagellation with whips that might have included metal hooks on the ends.When the plague burned itself out, its departure triggered major historical changes, including the Renaissance. Clergy, being one the hardest hit group, resulted in citizens believing that the ordained were not needed as a go-between with God sowing the seeds of the Reformation a couple of centuries later. Additionally, the depopulation of the workforce spurred technological advances in the invention of labor-saving devices. One invention included the Gutenberg printing press.I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the impact of the Black Death and its ramification on public health, society, religion, and technological innovation. This event and its subsequent plague years were true history makers.
    • 3/5
      Devastating!
    • 4/5
      An extremely readable look at the Black Death (called the Great Mortality at the time) as it spread across Europe from historical, geographical and medical viewpoints. There are plenty of telling quotes from contemporary sources and when these are not available, Kelly uses quotes from subsequent appearances of the plague in the same location. This is not original research however, it is a composite of the work of others.The introduction to emergence of the plague in the 1340's and the probable different types (bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic) is extremely useful to someone, like myself, who was not previously aware of the medical analysis.The background to the historical period is good, but did sometimes feel as if Kelly were adding the background as he had researched it and found it interesting, rather than it being particularly relevant to the story he was telling.There were two factors that detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. Firstly, at times, particularly near the beginning, it felt as you were jumping back and forth in time and space as the background was being developed. This part could have done with tighter editing. Secondly, Kelly enjoys the use of metaphor to describe the movement of the plague, which makes for a readable book, but I felt overdid this, especially when he anthropomorphises the plague; it just jarred.But these are minor criticisms of the style and the author must be congratulated for making such a tragic tale, so interesting whilst maintaining your consciousness that this was a catastrophe for those involved.I end with the heart breaking quote that Kelly considers most haunting in all the literature of the Black Death, perhaps because it is as he say plain spoken "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."
    • 5/5
      A well written and very entertaining chronicle of the Black Death's visit in the mid-1300s. Maybe a little more detailed than I would have liked. Opened my eyes to the sweeping positive effect such an event can have on the planet. The Plague opened the doors for huge leaps forward in industrial modernization (like the printing press), radically changed the political and economic landscape, and transformed social and gender roles. Medicine had been inching slowly toward science, and way from astrology, and the Plague helped spur vast changes to the entire medical community - doctors, hospitals, and medical education. Maybe it's just me, but I rarely find so detailed an historical take as this. Hard to put it down.
    • 3/5
      Though on 18 April 1970 I read Philip Ziegler's book on the Black Death i thought I would read this book to see if it told the story better. The Black Death was brought to Europe on a ship which had been in the Crimea and in 1347 came to Europe and spread the plague, which raged through nearly every place in Europe till about 1351. There are a lot of horrendous accounts of the deaths and the evil things people did to those they suspected of having something to do with the plague--but apparently the rats, who had much to do with it were not suspected particularly. Some localities saw half or even more of the population die. Europe was outrunning its resources so in a way the plague made Europe more livable for those fortunate enough to survive. The accounts of the mistreatment of Jews show where Hitler maybe leaarned some of his evil ways. I was pleased to see that the Pope did condemn such mistreatment. Also of interest was the account of the Flagellants who mistreated themselves in mass marches in 1348 and 1349--and people stood and watched! It was a fearsome time and this book does a fair job on the subject.
    • 3/5
      Well. You certainly can't claim that John Kelly wasn't thorough.At first I really did find the book interesting and the writing engaging. But after about a hundred pages, it just got really old. Kelly's writing is certainly pretty and elaborate, but after a while it gets really hard to keep track of whatever he's talking about. Sentences get really wordy.For my purposes, the book was -too- thorough. I only wanted to know about the Black Death, honestly. I'm not a big history buff, so the centuries worth of flashbacks and backstories were unnecessary, in my opinion. Kelly also referenced more modern happenings, which might have seemed like a clever idea at the time, but only served to confuse me as I tried to make the connection.Maybe I'm just not enough of a historian to appreciate a masterpiece, so I'm sorry. The Great Mortality is HIGHLY informative, covering all bases of every tiny village affected by the plague along with the history and future of every tiny village. Add in some Jewish history and the arguments of the plague deniers (who, despite the misleading name, don't believe that the plague was a giant conspiracy), and you've got a very detailed book about ... a lot of things.
    • 3/5
      I’d give it a 3-½. It seems the author wanted make an accessible, reader friendly book about the Black Death and mostly succeeded. There’s a good amount of information and I really got a sense of the time and places.

      Like others here, I was put off by some of the writing. For the most part he writes well and it’s a good read, but it seems like he was trying too hard to put some poetry in it. He personifies the virus constantly (the virus stopped outside of London and shot a game of pool and had a couple beers before heading into town) and throws awkward overwrought descriptive passages in whenever he can.

      He does attempt to tell personal stories that I assume are pieced together from records, and they’re mostly interesting, though it seems like he must be filling in a lot of blanks. He also goes into the ways the plague affected politics, society, and the economy of Europe. For me that was one of the most interesting parts of the book. There’s not a lot about the rest of the world, but that is partly due to lack of records.

      The whole thing could have been a little shorter. It seems like there’s a fair amount of repetition, and toward the middle it gets a little slow when he gives the play by play of how the plague entered what seems like every town in England. With some better editing this would be a much better book, but it’s still worth reading for a good overview of a turning point in history that’s not too bogged down in academics.
    • 3/5
      This may well be the funniest book I've ever read about the Black Death. Kelly's a good writer with a wry sense of humor. I also enjoyed the way he personified the plague- it's something I've always done in my head, too. I can just see Yersinia pestis striding through the countryside, scythe in hand.

      I've read a lot of plague books, so much of the information was familiar to me- but there's a lot of fascinating first-hand reporting from various sources, much of it new to me. The last chapter, about the revisionist theories regarding the actual identity of the plague-causing organism, was entirely riveting.

      Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.
    • 3/5
      Kelly lays out a very detailed, sometimes too detailed, history of the plague. While I found parts of the book very redundant, there were interesting stories mixed throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed reading about the correlation between the plague and weather trends, war, and diets. Even after reading the book, it is hard to comprehend how people dealt with not only the physical demand of disposing of thousands of bodies, but also the emotional trauma of losing so many family members. I wanted to like this book more, but became too sidetracked by all the rambling stories that often left we wondering how they related to the chapter.
    • 4/5
      Kelly takes us on a tour of Europe during the Black Death of 1348-49, during which death rates from the disease ranged from 20% in areas that "got off easy" to 70% in areas that were hit particularly hard. Most of the book's chapters examine the plague on a city by city basis. We see how people here reacted differently than people there. The only weakness in the book is that after a few chapters, it gets a bit repetitious. Though there are interesting differences in the way the death played out in London vs. Paris, there is enough similarity (naturally) to get a little tedious.
    • 3/5
      A well written account of the devastation of this plague that ravaged most of the world. And what a horrible time it must have been to have lived through it much less died from it. Kelly seems to have researched the subject well and intersperses it with historical connections of the time. Of particular note is the continued persecution of the Jews as scapegoats for this also. I can't help to think hundreds of years from now readers, if they read, will be shaking their heads about our time of horror dealing with cancer.
    • 4/5
      If you are interested in the Black Death and have never read a general history of it, Kelly is as good a place to start as any. It’s as well-written and full of anecdote as Norman F. Cantor’s shorter In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made and has not dated as much in its biological speculations. It ranges farther in space and time than Philip Ziegler’s mostly England-bound The Black Death. While it has almost has many stats as Robert Gottfried’s The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe, it thins them out with more prose.If you fancy yourself a bit of an amateur plague enthusiast, this book is an enjoyable read. Kelly has an eye for interesting people affected by the plague. We not only hear about Boccacio, but Joanna Queen of Naples and Sicily, beautiful defendant in a 1348 murder trial during the height of the plague in Avignon. We trace the final days of Joan Plantagenet, daughter of Edward III, who died of the plague while traveling to take marriage vows in Spain. We hear how the vermin “boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron” when the clothes were stripped off the body of the murdered Thomas Becket.Kelly bounces around a great deal in time and space to set the context for his plague tales. Thus, we don’t just hear about Mongol plague dead being catapulted over the walls of the Genoese colony at Caffa but also how there came to be such a settlement on the shores of the Black Sea. We don’t just hear of the murder of half of Strassbur’s Jews on Feb. 14, 1349 but how Europe’s anti-Semitism may have pushed into a deadlier form by an intra-faith dispute among Jews in the mid-13th century. We learn that the roving bands of Flagellants actually date back to a movement in 1260.Besides his literary style, Kelly does put some interesting emphasis on areas not dealt with extensively by the above plague authors. He shows how some of the Great Mortality’s first victims may have been from the Christian Nestorian colony around Lake Issyuk Kul in Mongolia. While other historians have noted the generally terrible conditions in 14th century Europe – constant warfare, failing crops, and the Malthusian trap of population outstripping resources, Kelly interestingly develops these notions. Kelly, more than any of the above authors, looks at other instances of the plague in history besides just the so-called second panemic of 1347. Thus he draws analogies between the unsanitary conditions fostered by medieval sieges and the counter-tactic of chevauchee (in essence, giant search-and-destroy missions conducted against civilians to force feudal lords out of their fortresses to defend them) with the presence of bubonic plague among the unhygienic Russian soldiers occupying Afghanistan. Kelly speculates, with some medical support, that the malnutrition of the Great Famine, which lasted from 1315-132,2 weakened the immune systems of some survivors who were at a vulnerable age. That is the explanation he offers for a high rate of mortality among adults in their 30s and 40s during the Great Mortality. And he devotes some time to speculation that the vector of the Great Mortality may not have been just the rat flea, X. cheopis, but also the human flea, pulex irritans. That may explain why so few contemporary accounts note the mass amounts of dead rats you would expect during a plague pandemic.Along with other historians, he notes the many effects the plague had on European culture including a decaying infrastructure due to lack of young workers, a result that inspired a contemporary bit of homework when students were asked to translate ”The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday” into Latin. And he notes that frequent reappearances of the plague may have indirectly helped push Europe away from its Malthusian trap. While subsequent plague epidemics were never as deadly, they, coupled with other diseases like flu, smallpox, syphilis, typhus, and the sweating sickness, kept the population from quickly bouncing back. The survivors, though, were wealthier than the pre-plague days.While he doesn’t go off on the improbable speculation that the Great Mortality, as its contemporaries dubbed it, was not plague but anthrax – a major part of Cantor’s work, some of his speculations on how the disease has mutated since 1347 or the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century AD, have dated. The most recent evidence, using DNA analysis of plague victims in England, shows little mutation of the bacteria yersina pestis since the 14th century. There also is little direct evidence linking yersina pestis to the Justinian’s Plague.
    • 4/5
      Non-fiction that reads almost like fiction. Not difficult or grim.
    • 5/5
      Terrific summary of the black plague and its impact on history. Not strictly historical, as the author provides his imaginings about what might have happened or how individuals may have behaved. These sometimes add, and sometimes distract, from the narrative. Weaves in a number of diverse literatures to explain the disease and it's travels.
    • 5/5
      Excellent study of the bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world during the mid-14th century. Kelly traces the lineage of the disease, its origins and the way it traveled all over the known world. Beginning in Asia and making its way to Italy, Kelly shows its progression through Europe chapter by chapter, discussing how the plague affected politics, economics and social patterns and traditions. Kelly gives an excellent overview of the devestation the Black Death had on the population, and how it changed the world.
    • 5/5
      In the bonus section of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time author John Kelly discusses three people who brought the period of Europe's Black Death to life for him. The first is Jacme De Podio, a peasant from Marseille. After Jacme's son, grand-daughter and daughter-in-law all died from the plague, he decided he should inherit his daughter-in-law's estate. To do so he had to find two witnesses who would swear out in court that she had died. Jacme spent two years searching the plague ravished city of Marseille, finally found the witnesses he needed and inherited the estate. Carpe Diem.The second was Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. One of the major celebrities of 14th century Europe, Queen Joanna stood accused of murdering her husband so she could marry her lover. Her trial in the Papal court at Avignon was the must see event of the day, drawing a crowd from every corner of the continent in spite of the plague that ravaged the land. She was found innocent, though later her former in-laws invaded her kingdom forcing her to flee to Provence where she was reuinted with her lover. The third is Agnolo di Tura called Agnolo the Fat. Agnolo, a hard-working man who rose from the lower classes to the upper middle class prior to the plague, wrote one of the better chronicles of the Black Death which sums up the plagues full horror, "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."The Black Death, called the Great Mortality by those who lived through it, was the greatest tragedy ever to befall Europe. (Whether or not its death toll was worse than that of World War II depends in part on how you manipulate the statistics.) While it brought about an end to the lives of millions, the Black Death changed the course of European history and laid the groundwork for the Renaissance.Mr. Kelly's book is a thorough and entertaining account of the Black Death from its origins to its after effects. While he presents the historical facts and the scientific details along with the numbers needed to understand the profound effects the Black Death had, Mr. Kelly's focus on the individual people of the time brings the story home as it brings the story to life. The story of the Black Death is full of scoundrals, heroes and everyone in between. Agnolo di Tura will be familiar to anyone who remembers what they studied in middle school, but others, like Queen Joanna of Naples have been kept out of the history books for one reason or another. Hers is one of many fascinating stories in The Great Mortality.The Great Mortality is a history book for both lovers and non-lovers of history. While there is enough detail in The Great Mortality to answer all but the most obscure questions anyone might have about the Black Death, the book never becomes lost in arcane information or bogged down in academic language. The story of The Great Mortality is always interesting, often moving, and at times inspiring. That all of Agnolo di Tura's children died moves the reader, but so does the knowledge that he carried on in spite of this. In fact, he remarried and became successful enough to complain about his worker's demands for higher wages.
    • 4/5
      The Great Mortality is a synthesis of more specialized scholarly texts using some of the latest creative non-fiction techniques to make it more accessible for the general reader. Due to the nature of the sources, the Black Death is actually a very difficult subject matter to turn into a readable narrative - as so many failed past attempts can attest - and this is probably the best there is at the moment. Kelly covers the main themes: outbreak and origins, biology, depopulation, social and economic effects, persecutions, religion. There are end-notes (no in-line footnote), but oddly no bibliography, or no Further Reading, such as a list of modern literature about the Black Death. Kelly makes some large leaps towards the end about the consequences of the Black Death, namely, by de-populating Europe, the Black Death ushered in the Early Modern Era with an emphasis on labor saving devices. Although this conclusion seems like common sense, it is problematic on a number of fronts - not the least being the Black Death was only one of many reasons for a demographic decline in the Late Middle Ages. As well, scholarship is actually divided if the Black Death really had any major consequences at all - it is one of the great questions of history. For the most part things just continued on as they had - the Hundred Years War took a short break then picked right back where it left off, etc.. Kelley doesn't question or go into all the finer details of his conclusions. It's very easy, too easy in a popular history book, to reach sweeping conclusions about the books subject matter "changed the world" (so many books have sub-titles to that effect), the difficult part is to prove it and I'm not sure Kelly has fully represented the scholarship. He does do an excellent job of representing the most recent debate about what caused the Black Death (plague or some other disease).Overall I found the book highly readable, but nothing particularly new and some of the conclusions are sweeping in what was a very complex period. I've read much about it already in survey texts and encyclopedia articles, but Kelly goes into enough detail, with quotes from primary sources, to make it more tangible. If you want a "one book" on the subject without needing specialized knowledge of the Middle Ages this is probably the best there is.
    • 4/5
      An interesting synthesis of the research on the Black Death that swept through Europe and Asia in the 1300s and devastated the world economy and society. Ultimately Kelly's conclusions are not earth-shattering, but the book is an accessible, scholarly read. For those of you who enjoy books on the plague, or history, this is recommended.