This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.
Author(s): Ben Dodds
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 297
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Remembering the Distant Past
1.2 Who Remembers and Why Does It Matter?
1.3 Producing and Circulating Memory and Myth
1.4 Myths and Memories of the Black Death
Chapter 2: Rediscovering the Black Death
2.1 Mary Shelley, the Black Death and Gothic Epidemiology
2.2 Cholera and the Black Death
2.3 Black Death Memory, Science and Response to Disease
2.4 Black Death Memory and Literature
2.5 Conclusions
Chapter 3: The Black Death and Englishness
3.1 John Richard Green, the Black Death and English Freedom
3.2 More Than “Court Pageants and the Wars of Kings”: Frederic Seebohm and James Thorold Rogers
3.3 The Influence of Seebohm, Rogers and Green
3.4 Catholic England, the Reformation and the Black Death as Battleground
3.5 Conclusions: English Pasts and the Present
Chapter 4: Plague in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
4.1 Plague in India
4.2 Historical Scholarship
4.3 Literature, Natural Selection and the End of Humanity
4.4 Conclusions
Chapter 5: The Black Death and War in the Mid-Twentieth Century
5.1 Fictionalized Plagues
5.2 Medieval Art History
5.3 The Threat of Nuclear War
5.4 Conclusions
Chapter 6: New Explanatory Frameworks and Black Death Forgetting
6.1 Questioning the Role of the Black Death
6.2 The Black Death and Explanatory Frameworks
6.3 Textbooks, Historical Fiction and a Comic Medievalism
6.4 Conclusions
Chapter 7: Imagining Victory Over the Black Death
7.1 Alternate Histories
7.2 Historical Romances
7.3 Conclusions
Chapter 8: Denial, Climate Change and New Evidence about the Black Death
8.1 Plague Denial and Remembering
8.2 Climate Change
8.3 Consequences
8.4 Conclusions
Chapter 9: Conclusion
9.1 COVID-19
9.2 Myths and Memories
Bibliography
Index
