From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (review)

John Aberth. From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 2000. xvi + 304 pp. Ill. $U.S. 26.00; $Can. 35.00; £15.99 (0-415-92715-3).

From the Brink of the Apocalypse takes as its theme the undergraduate history student's perennial favorite topic: devastation and disaster in the later Middle Ages. This lively book is framed by a prologue that lays out several manifestations of fourteenth-century apocalypticism, and the author structures his narrative around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rev. 6:1-8)--Famine, War, Plague, and Death--all of which were abundantly present in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. True to his own background in medieval English history, John Aberth devotes most of his attention to the English experience in the later Middle Ages.

Aberth's thesis, in keeping with trends in late medieval history since at least the early 1960s, ¹ is that the crisis of the later Middle Ages represented not a time of decline, but rather a moment of opportunity for Europeans to come up with many creative solutions to their problems. Synthesizing the work of previous scholars (and his own work on plague mortality and the effects of purveyance on the English countryside), he presents much of interest to the historian of medicine. In his chapter on famine, for example, he demonstrates effectively that the actions of men--such as war, taxation, and the victualing of armies--could create or exacerbate a famine. When he treats war, Aberth situates the beginnings of modern, destructive warfare in the Hundred Years' War, with a shift from a code of chivalry and a desire to take captives for ransom to a "new desire and determination to exterminate the enemy" (p. 63). His discussion of plague includes a revision of the standard estimate of mortality rates during the years of the Black Death of 1347-49 (one-fourth to one-third of the population); based on his own and others' work on English bishops' registers, heriots (death taxes paid by serfs), monastic records, and other documents, Aberth cites much higher death rates, ranging from 40 to 80 percent. In his chapter on death, he presents such macabre artifacts as transi tombs (tombs portraying the dead--and often decaying--corpse) and the Dance of Death as one side of a coin whose obverse was the fervent hope of resurrection, salvation, and eternal life.

Enriched by abundant, thoughtfully chosen illustrations and enlivened by apt quotations from contemporary chronicles and literary works, this volume would make a fine companion to an undergraduate course on late medieval Europe. It is not without flaws, however. Relying as heavily as he does on the work of previous scholars, Aberth has left some curious holes in his reading list. His bibliography for the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, for example, does not include Steven Justice's fascinating reinterpretation (Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, 1994). Nor does his discussion of apocalypse manuscripts mention Suzanne Lewis's important Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (1995). There are occasional errors of fact, as well: penicillin is not the treatment for plague (p. 113); dropsy is not "a neurological disorder causing a 'drop,' or sagging of the face" (p. 130); and "quack" is not a word used by "men of the Middle Ages" to refer to "physicians who went around in their beaklike masks to ward off contagion" (p. 118)--the derivation is from the "quacking" of early modern mountebanks or quacksalvers, and Aberth's "beaklike mask" is most probably a nod to early modern physicians' garb, first introduced in 1619. Finally, one wonders why a book ostensibly devoted to manifestations of apocalyptic disaster in the later Middle Ages does not...