Little L.K. Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. — 382 p.Plague was a key factor in the waning of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Eight centuries before the Black Death, a pandemic of plague engulfed the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and eventually extended as far east as Persia and as far north as the British Isles. It persisted sporadically from 541 to 750, the same period that witnessed the distinctive shaping of the Byzantine Empire, a new prominence of the Roman papacy and of monasticism, the beginnings of Islam and the meteoric expansion of the Arabic Empire, the ascent of the Carolingian dynasty in Frankish Gaul, and, not coincidentally, the beginnings of a positive work ethic in the Latin West.
In this volume, twelve scholars using history, archaeology, epidemiology, and molecular biology have produced a comprehensive account of the pandemic’s origins, spread, and mortality, as well as its economic, social, political, and religious effects. The historians’ sources are in Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Old Irish. The archaeologists’ sources include burial pits, abandoned villages, and aborted building projects. The epidemiologists use the written sources to track the disease’s means and speed of transmission, the mix of vulnerability and resistance it encountered, and the patterns of reappearance over time. Finally, molecular biologists, newcomers to this kind of investigation, have become pioneers of paleopathology, seeking ways to identify pathogens in human remains from the remote past.
Lester K. Little is Dwight W. Morrow Professor Emeritus of History at Smith College and former Director of the American Academy in Rome. He is a past President of the Medieval Academy of America and also of the International Union of Institutes of Archaeology, Art History, and History in Rome. He is the author of Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France and Religious
Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe.