The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow Andrew Fogleman Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), xxxii + 1026 pp., 94 ills. The Complete History of the Black Death is ostensibly the second edition of Ole J. Benedictow’s 2004 work by a similar name. But given so much new content (593 more pages than the first edition), it might be considered a new work that builds upon and persistently defends the findings of his first edition. In the spirit of the Annales tradition of “total history,” Benedictow provides the reader with a holistic study of the Black Death, synthesizing an impressive array of regional studies to establish the spread and mortality rates of the plague, providing demographic analysis with attention to source-specific problems, and guiding the reader through modern medical plague studies. Along the way, he argues that the Black Death is best understood as a rat-and-rat-flea-borne disease, that the outbreak of the Black Death happened in the Volga delta of southern Russia from which it spread west to Europe and east to China, and that the European mortality rates—factoring in source-critical reservations—were as high as sixty-five percent. The book is divided into five sections: a description of the Black Death containing its medical, clinical, and epidemiological features (pt. 1); a history of the plague before the Black Death (pt. 2); the outbreak and spread of the Black Death (pt. 3); the mortality of the Black Death with chapter profiles of mortality rates for six countries (pt. 4); and a final reflection that presents the Black Death as a turning point in history (pt. 5). The book also includes a helpful glossary of terms, twenty-three maps, seven figures, and sixty-four tables. At 1026 pages, this book will likely serve as a reference work for readers interested in specific questions, debates, or regional studies of the Black Death. The transmission of plague by the black rat flea was discovered in India and developed by the Indian Plague Research Commission (IPRC) in the early twentieth century. Benedictow draws extensively on their research in this portion of the book, arguing that only black rat fleas satisfy the various conditions needed to support the transmission of plague on an epidemic scale and that there “is not any empirically observed or realistically conceivable alternative of transmission” (34, 37). Benedictow shows that black rat fleas are uniquely suited for transmitting plague because they have developed a peculiar kind of blockage in the fore-gut of their stomach caused by the growth of a biofilm, which blocks infected blood from passing through the flea and causes plague bacteria to move back into bite wounds during feeding, thus infecting the host (33). Human plague cases, Benedictow notes, “do not have a role in the epidemiology of plague” because plague bacteria levels in humans are too low to cause human fleas or lice to transmit plague (31). Benedictow further demonstrates the improbability of human, human fleas, or human lice playing any significant role in plague transmission by proving an inverse correlation between population density and mortality and morbidity (ch. 44). This “defining feature” of bubonic plague, seen in mortality rates from twentieth-century India and China and medieval studies of the County of Savoy and of England, reveals that lower population concentrations suffer higher mortality rates (882, 883). Benedictow observes that these findings contradict the central tenet of modern scientific epidemiology (for human transmission of disease) that “an increased density of the susceptible population will facilitate its spread” (877). These findings corroborate the rat-and-rat-flea-basis [End Page 211] of bubonic plague transmission (885). Benedictow also observes that this feature of the bubonic plague helps to explain the devastation of the Black Death, because some ninety percent of Europe’s population lived in the countryside and were thus more susceptible to the plague than urban residents. The story of the outbreak and spread of the Black Death across Europe constitutes the book’s central section (509 pages), with chapters devoted to the spread of plague in four regions and sixteen different countries. As in...