Abstract
The German physician and medical historian Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker’s pioneering 1832 work on the Black Death is generally regarded as the beginning of modern historical scholarship on this subject. Hecker is credited not only with coining, if not universalising, the term ‘the Black Death’, but also with setting the emotional tone of historical epidemiology—as Gothic epidemiology. In the same vein, other medical authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forged the basic tenets of historical epidemiology and helped lay the foundations of the burgeoning field of modern scientific epidemiology. This body of scholarship has its flaws: it singles out the Black Death as a distinct historical phenomenon, separate from other plague outbreaks, and is overtly Eurocentric and Orientalist in tenor. These characteristics underscore the heavy ideological baggage of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical scholarship on the Black Death whose legacy still continues today.
But should not it be worthwhile learning about a disease that has acquired such a dreadful name?
—Kurt Polycarp Joachim Sprengel, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Medicin (Halle in der Rengerschen Buchhandlung, 1794), p. 36.
This disastrous pestilence, known everywhere under the name of the Black Death, as one of the great events in the world’s history, has fixed he attention of writers in a high degree, and has been thought worthy to be painted in minutest details and in the most vivid colours.
—August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, translated by Charles Creighton (London: The New Sydenham Society, 1883), p. 497.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Currently, there is no consensus about when the Second Pandemic ended. For a critical discussion of periodisation of plague pandemics and its inherent Eurocentrism, see: Nükhet Varlık, ‘New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters’, The Medieval Globe 1 Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death (2014): 193–227. Newest research suggests that the periodisation of the Second Plague Pandemic will have to be revised radically, with the Black Death starting in mid-thirteenth century, instead of the mid-fourteenth; Monica H. Green, ‘The Four Black Deaths’, American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (Dec. 2020): 1601–1631.
- 2.
For a thoughtful pedagogical treatment of how to teach the Black Death, see: Monica H. Green, ‘On Learning How to Teach the Black Death’, HPS&ST Note (March 2018): 7–33, https://www.hpsst.com/uploads/6/2/9/3/62931075/2018march.pdf (last accessed 11 June 2020). For a comprehensive bibliography on the state of the field of Black Death research, see: Joris Roosen and Monica H. Green, ‘The Mother of All Pandemics: The State of Black Death Research in the Era of COVID-19—Bibliography’, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/view?usp=sharing (last accessed 12 May 2021).
- 3.
Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 17.
- 4.
Here it may be noted that the term Black Death, along with others used in medievalist terminology, has recently come under closer scrutiny and criticism, especially in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matters protests. See, for example: Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘“Black Death” Matters: A Modern Take on a Medieval Pandemic’, https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/black-death-matters-a-modern-take-on-a-medieval-pandemic-8b1cf4062d9e (last accessed 11 June 2020).
- 5.
Needless to say, the Arabic, Persian and Turkish terms resulted from a process of autocolonialism, the acceptance of what I refer to elsewhere as ‘epidemiological orientalism’; Nükhet Varlık, ‘“Oriental Plague” or Epidemiological Orientalism? Revisiting the Plague Episteme of the Early Modern Mediterranean’. In Nükhet Varlık (ed.) Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean, pp. 57–87 (Kalamazoo MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017).
- 6.
A search using Google Books Ngram Viewer reveals that the term ‘Black Death’ was used a few times in the early nineteenth century in reference to the mid-fourteenth-century epidemic. See, for example: John Richard Green, History of the English People (Chicago IL: Donohue, Henneberry & Co., 1800), vol. 2, p. 22. There are also slightly earlier uses. See, for example: James Pettit Andrews, The History of Great Britain (London: T. Burton and Co., 1794), vol. 1, pp. 371–373. Note that Andrews uses the Black Death in quotation marks and with additional clarification for his readers, which suggests that it was not an established term yet. The two opening quotes above frame that process quite nicely. While the former quote from Sprengel in 1794 marks a moment when the term needed to be explained because it was not yet known, the latter by Hirsch in 1883 makes it clear that it was already in the process of becoming an established term.
- 7.
See: Emile Littré, ‘Opuscule relatif à la peste de 1348, composé par un contemporain’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 2 (1841): 201–243, poem on p. 228:Verse
Verse Cum rex finisset oracula judiciorum, Mors nigra surrexit, et gentes reddidit illi; Vitaque victa dolens confusa recessit ab aula. Postea venerunt Saturnus, Jupiter et Mars Coram rege, quibus commisit ut exequerentur Наeс sua judicia divinis edita verbis. (Italics mine)
- 8.
Galar y Beirdd: Marwnadau Plant: Poets’ Grief: Medieval Welsh Elegies for Children, edited and translated by Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: Tafol, 1993), pp. 56–58; David Hale, ‘Death and Commemoration in Late Medieval Wales’, PhD diss., University of South Wales, 2018, for the Welsh original see pp. 370–373, for the English translation see pp. 373–375. I thank Sam Cohn for bringing this early poem to my attention. (Italics mine)
- 9.
For a critical examination of cultural, racial, and rhetorical meanings embedded in black metaphors in medieval, early modern, and modern European society, see: Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
- 10.
Stephen D’Irsay, ‘Notes to the Origin of the Expression: “Atra Mors”, Isis 8, no. 2 (1926): 328–332.
- 11.
Johannes Pontanus, Rerum danicarum historia, libris X (Amsterdam, 1631), 476: ‘Vulgo & ab effectu atram mortem vocitabant’. Also cited in Adrien Phillippe, Histoire de la peste noire, p. 137. In 1893, Gasquet noted, with a fair degree of skepticism, that the term may have had its origins in Denmark or Sweden, without suggesting a direct connection; Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, 2nd edition (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), p. 7. He suggests instead that the term Black Death was probably not used before the Great Plague of London (1665), probably to differentiate them; ibid., p. 8.
- 12.
I. Reichborn-Kjennerud, ‘Notes and Queries: Black Death’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 3, no. 2 (1948): 359–360, p. 359; Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 17. The term Svartidauði (black death) was used in Icelandic sources in reference to the medieval plague, but ironically enough in reference to 1402, the year plague arrived at the island, and not to the Black Death of 1346–1353.
- 13.
Reichborn-Kjennerud argued in 1948 that the name schwarze Tod was brought to Germany from Icelandic through the translation of an Icelandic book of travel from 1771 titled Svarti dauði (black death); Reichborn-Kjennerud, ‘Notes and Queries’, pp. 359–360. This 1948 article has remained fairly obscure; the particular lineage proposed in it does not seem to have been taken up by other modern scholarship.
- 14.
August Ludwig von Schlözer, Isländische Literatur und Geschichte (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1773), vol. 1, p. 3: ‘der schwarze Tod, oder sie große Pest’ (the black death or the great pestilence).
- 15.
Schlözer, Isländische Literatur, vol. 1, p. 4. Schlözer based his periodisation on the year 1350, as the year of the great Pest in Icelandic history and literature.
- 16.
Sprengel, Beiträge, p. 36. His Handbuch der Pathologie, published in 1795 does talk about plague but he does not use the term der schwarze Tod in it; instead he uses Pest or Epidemie.
- 17.
Sprengel, Beiträge, p. 36.
- 18.
For earliest-known examples of the use of “Black Death” in English language publications, see note 8 above. Similarly, the term enters the French language around that time. Peste noire starts to appear in that specific meaning in the 1830s. See, for example: Adrien Phillippe, Histoire de la peste noire: 1346–1350 d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Direction de publicité médicale, 1853), which includes documents from Hecker’s work. Philippe writes: ‘Ils [peste et choléra] … sont sortis de ce sol impur du Levant, sur lequel ont germé, dans le cours des âges, les contagions les plus désastreuses’ (p. viii).
- 19.
Mrs. Markham, A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the 14th Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria (London: John Murray, 1853), p. 152.
- 20.
Gasquet , The Black Death, 7. Here Gasquet cites Karl Lechner’s 1884 Das grosse Sterben in Deutschland, but Lechner actually does not give an exact date about when the term started being used; he simply notes that he was not able to find when it was used for the first time. He only notes that the term schwarzer Tod was not used in the fourteenth century in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, and that it was not in circulation for at least another century after the Black Death. See: Karl Lechner, Das große Sterben in Deutschland in den Jahren 1348–1351 und die folgenden Pestepidemie bis zum Schlusse des 14. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1884), pp. 8–9.
- 21.
James Murray, A New English Dictionary On Historical Principles, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. 73. Here Murray cites earlier uses of the term both in English-language publications and in other languages to confirm that the epithet ‘black’ is ‘of uncertain origin’ and certainly not contemporary to the pandemic itself.
- 22.
J. F. C. Hecker, Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Herbig, 1832).
- 23.
Faye Marie Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining: Meaning, Continuity, and Revolutionary Change in Histories of Medieval Plague’, Journal of the History of Biology 24, no. 2 (1991): 265–289, p. 275; J. F. C. Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, trans. B. G. Babington (London: Trübner, 1859).
- 24.
For further discussion on Hecker’s ‘gothic epidemiology’, see: Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining’; for an observation about the orientalist character of this epidemiology, see 276n50. I use the term Gothic here, only in reference to Gothic epidemiology, as proposed by Getz and discussed in greater detail below, to characterise the emotional tenor of the historical narrative, with an emphasis of death, disease, and destruction. The reference to Gothic here should not be confused with Gothic art or architecture, which have different intellectual genealogies.
- 25.
August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, translated by Charles Creighton (London: The New Sydenham Society, 1883); Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891–1894).
- 26.
Hecker, The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century, translated by B. G. Babington (London: A. Schloss, 1833), pp. 72–73.
- 27.
For green sickness, see: Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2009).
- 28.
A. Brayer, Neuf années à Constantinople (Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour et Lowell, 1836).
- 29.
Ibid., iii.
- 30.
Ibid., Neuf années, vi.
- 31.
Ibid., Neuf années, vi.
- 32.
The Edinburgh Review 64 (1837): 125–155, quote on pp. 126–127.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 34.
These two competing traditions still remain in effect today, with ongoing discussions of ‘collapse’ versus ‘resilience’ especially in the field of environmental history. In the context of plague, a recent controversy calls into question the demographic and economic impact of the Justinianic Plague and its overall effect on late Antique society. See, for example: Lee Mordechai, Merle Eisenberg, ‘Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague’, Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2019): 3–50.
- 35.
Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining’, pp. 266–267.
- 36.
It may be important to note here that both the Flagellants movement and the Jewish pogroms predate the Black Death. See, for example: R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., ‘The Black Death and the Burning of Jews’, Past & Present 196 (2007): 3–36; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Hecker may or may not have known that, but his emphasis on these phenomena set the tone for the narrative, making these elements staples of future narratives of the Black Death.
- 37.
Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining’, p. 279.
- 38.
See: Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, p. 4.
- 39.
Varlık, ‘“Oriental Plague”’. The Plague of Marseille was a turning point for the articulation of a European scholarly consensus that situated the Ottoman Empire as the origin of all historical plague outbreaks that affected Europe. See: Nükhet Varlık, ‘Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of COVID-19’, Centaurus 62, no. 2 (2020): 285–293.
- 40.
Sprengel, Handbuch der Pathologie (1795), pp. 523–524.
- 41.
Sprengel, Beiträge, pp. 37–38.
- 42.
Varlık, ‘“Oriental Plague”’.
- 43.
Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, p. 60.
- 44.
David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 81.
- 45.
Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 2–3.
- 46.
Henry Percy Potter, ‘The Oriental Plague in Its Social, Economical, Political, and International Relations, Special Reference Being Made to the Labours of John Howard on the Subject’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 43, no. 4 (1880): 606–613, p. 608. In his ‘Historical Sketch’, Potter relies on William A. Guy’s Public Health published a decade earlier; William A. Guy, Public Health: A Popular Introduction to Sanitary Science (London: Renshaw, 1870).
- 47.
Potter, ‘The Oriental Plague’, pp. 605–606.
- 48.
See, for example: Adrien Proust, La défense de l’Europe contre la peste et la Conférence de Venise de 1897 (Paris: Masson, 1897), p. 104: ‘mais nous croyons que cette peste offre les mêmes caractères que la peste d’Orient.’ About two decades before, Potter had pointed out that plague’s nosological classification was controversial among the European medical establishment. He opined that plague was very similar to typhus; Potter, ‘Oriental Plague’, p. 611. In fact, plague’s nosology was being debated for quite some time. An example from the turn of the nineteenth century comes from the writings of the Scottish medical writer James Tytler. Following the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Tytler compared plague (‘Asiatic or True Plague’) to yellow fever and concluded that ‘true plague’ is distinguished by its high mortality; James Tytler, A Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever (Salem: Printed by Joshua Cushing, for B.B. Macanulty 1799). Even though Tytler’s treatise does not use the term ‘Oriental plague’, a very critical review of his book published the next year refers to plague as ‘Oriental plague’. See: ‘Review of A Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever, by James Tytler’, Medical Repository 3, no. 4 (1800), pp. 373–379. In a similar vein, Hecker used the term Oriental plague mostly for nosological purposes in the first half of the nineteenth century; Hecker, The Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
- 49.
Lori Jones, Time, Space, and the Plague: Rereading English and French Plague Tracts, 1348–1750 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming).
- 50.
See, for example: Schmid et al., ‘Climate-driven Introduction of the Black Death and Successive Plague Reintroductions into Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 10 (2015): 3020–3025; Dean et al., ‘Human Ectoparasites and Spread of Plague in Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 6 (2018): 1304–1309; Namouchi et al., ‘Integrative Approach Using Yersinia pestis Genomes to Revisit the Historical Landscape of Plague during the Medieval Period’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 50 (2018): E11790–7. It is important to note that these publications came even after a fully rationalised, quite brilliantly argued case was made for plague persistence within Western Europe by Ann Carmichael in 2014; Ann G. Carmichael, ‘Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis’, The Medieval Globe 1 (2014): 157–191. Likewise, several paleogenetics studies have convincingly demonstrated such persistence in the meantime. See, for example: Kirsten I. Bos et al., ‘Eighteenth-Century Yersinia pestis Genomes Reveal the Long-Term Persistence of an Historical Plague Focus’, eLife 5 (2016): e12994; Lisa Seifert et al., ‘Genotyping Yersinia pestis in Historical Plague: Evidence for Long-Term Persistence of Y. Pestis in Europe from the 14th to the 17th Century’, PLoS ONE 11, no. 1 (2016): e0145194; Maria A. Spyrou et al., ‘Historical Y. pestis Genomes Reveal the European Black Death as the Source of Ancient and Modern Plague Pandemics’, Cell Host and Microbe 19, no. 6 (2016): 874–881.
- 51.
Ann G. Carmichael, ‘Pesthouse Imaginaries’, in this volume.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Varlık, N. (2021). Why Is Black Death Black? European Gothic Imaginaries of ‘Oriental’ Plague. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72303-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72304-0
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)