Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death, 2nd edn (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), pp. 1058, £ 143, hardback, ISBN: 9781783275168.

Abstract

[...]it is impossible to master everything in such a considerable mass of documentation on a global scale (covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia): this poses a real challenge, according to the author’s own introduction! With J.F.D. Shrewsbury on the Bubonic plague in the British Isles (1971), or the documentary trails produced by Philip Ziegler (1969) or Rosemary Horrox (1994), David Herlihy (1965–91), Élisabeth Carpentier (1963) and M. Livi Bacci for Italy (1978), Marie-Hélène Congourdeau for the Byzantine territory (1988–98) or Michael Dols (1974–82) and Mohammed Melhaoui (Paris, 2005, not cited) for the Arabic world (Egypt and North Africa) provide a base of capital data. The main purpose is to trace the outbreak and spread of the pandemic: its origin, its modes of diffusion, the epidemic progress, in order to better understand the epidemiological mechanism, its nature, and to evaluate its incidence of lethality and mortality. While the first evidence from the genetic examination of dental pulp dates the origins of the plague back to around 5,100–4,900 years ago in Sweden (p. 98), the emergence of research in palaeobiology, in particular on DNA (Hinnebusch, 2002–17, Bos, Holmes, Callaway, in Nature, 2011, Wagner, Lancet, 2014), has provided a very supportive context for knowledge renewal: a ‘molecular history’ (McCormick, 2007) is open!