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Reviewed by:
  • Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750
  • Ann G. Carmichael
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750. Edited by Lester E. Little (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006) 360 pp. $75.00

Almost two decades ago, Durliat issued a challenge to other historians working in the late antique, early medieval period.1 He doubted that the lurid, frequently quoted descriptions of pestilence were more than literary hyperbole. This collection of essays provides the response to those who agree that big epidemics can produce significant historical effects. All of the contributions are by historians, and most of them circle back to the texts that insistently prompt re-examination of the origins, path, duration, responses, and long-term effect of recurrent plagues—works by Procopius and Bishop John of Ephesus (541–543), Gregory of Tours, Bede, Paul the Deacon (writing later), and a few other vivid ones not cited so often.

The two essays relegated to the end of the volume, by Robert [End Page 255] Sallares and Michael McCormick, pursue a multidisciplinary perspective, exploring what new, nontraditional investigations can be envisioned. These contributions show that recent developments in archaeology and molecular biology lend weight to a claim that texts alone can merely make suggestive—that Yersinia pestis was responsible for the more dramatic features displayed by victims of recurrent pestilence throughout this two-century interval. Epidemics driven or enhanced by this particular pathogen cause catastrophic mortality, and contribute to broad social, economic, demographic, and cultural changes.

The volume shows that a synthetic assemblage of plague events across great geographical, temporal, linguistic, and cultural divides is possible with collaborative research. The twelve chapters in the volume are grouped into four geographical and linguistic bundles and two bracketing overview sections. Alain Stoclet’s chapter within the section devoted to “The Latin West”—a trimmed, updated, and translated article originally published in 1988—comes closest to the theme of a culturally distinctive early medieval Christian society emerging in response to catastrophe. In Christian Gaul, bishops departed from their Byzantine counterparts by using processions, litanies, relics, and other material manipulations of the sacred to confront epidemics. Already in the sixth century, Latin Christendom was distinguished from the still-classical eastern Mediterranean by its particular religious responses to plague.

John Maddicott’s review of plague in seventh-century England from the same section—also an earlier publication—acquires new force within this context, accentuating the explanatory problem that plague presented within the newly vibrant Church in England. The archaeological and historical evidence singles out monasteries not only as sites where plague was especially devastating but also as sites from which it tended to disseminate. Apostasy among recently Christianized kingdoms and the creation of a new English saint (Cuthbert) to “spin” interpretation of what had occurred were urgent matters for the Church.

Michael Kulikowski’s contribution on the plague in Visigothic Spain summarizes chronicle accounts before wresting new evidence from a Toledo homiliary (four sermons on plague), providing the texts in an appendix. Kulikowski also connects recent archaeological findings to larger changes in burial practices, showing how plague may have propelled social change.

Ann Dooley meticulously assembled Irish evidence of a more textual and linguistic orientation ultimately to postulate a connection between plagues and thaumaturgic monarchs. Little’s introduction to the volume adds to this section’s general emphasis on the religious changes linked to plague in Latin Christendom, discussing the early medieval selection of new saintly protectors, especially Saint Sebastian.

A number of the essays summarize more expansive publications about the plague in Constantinople and Syria, where the spiritual issues and the archaeological evidence cast a vastly different light on the effects [End Page 256] of recurrent plague. The scholars contributing to the large section on “The Near East” and “The Byzantine Empire” (Michael Morony, Hugh N. Kennedy, Dionysios Stathakopoulos, and Peter Sarris) spend relatively more time on the textual and archaeological challenges of researching the plague centuries. These four contributions are more ponderous, but they make important evidentiary claims about the recurrences of a specific epidemic disease distinguishable from viral infections (such as smallpox) and acute immiseration due to war or harvest failures. Sarris’ article...

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