The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's… Product details and pricing info |
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66 Customer Reviews Posted
- Non-specialist popular history
- _The Great Mortality_ is a synthesis of more specialized scholarly texts using some of the latest creative non-fiction techniques to make it more accessible for the general reader. Due to the nature of the sources, the Black Death is actually a very difficult subject matter to turn into a readable narrative - as so many failed past attempts can attest - and this is probably the best there is at the moment. Kelly covers the main themes: outbreak and origins, biology, depopulation, social and economic effects, persecutions, religion. There are end-notes (no in-line footnote), but oddly no bibliography, or no Further Reading, such as a list of modern literature about the Black Death.
Kelly makes some large leaps towards the end about the consequences of the Black Death, namely, by de-populating Europe, the Black Death ushered in the Early Modern Era with an emphasis on labor saving devices. Although this conclusion seems like common sense, it is problematic on a number of fronts - not the least being the Black Death was only one of many reasons for a demographic decline in the Late Middle Ages. As well, scholarship is actually divided if the Black Death really had any major consequences at all - it is one of the great questions of history. For the most part things just continued on as they had - the Hundred Years War took a short break then picked right back where it left off, etc.. Kelley doesn't question or go into all the finer details of his conclusions. It's very easy, too easy in a popular history book, to reach sweeping conclusions about the books subject matter "changed the world" (so many books have sub-titles to that effect), the difficult part is to prove it and I'm not sure Kelly has fully represented the scholarship. He does do an excellent job of representing the most recent debate about what caused the Black Death (plague or some other disease).
Overall I found the book highly readable, but nothing particularly new and some of the conclusions are sweeping in what was a very complex period. I've read much about it already in survey texts and encyclopedia articles, but Kelly goes into enough detail, with quotes from primary sources, to make it more tangible. If you want a "one book" on the subject without needing specialized knowledge of the Middle Ages this is probably the best there is. - 2008-10-16, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Great Book!
- This book was very well written and researched. Anyone interested in learning more about what life was like before, during, and after the plague of the 1300's will be aptly rewarded by The Great Mortality. Kelly is witty, factual, creative, and weaves it all together with a true appreciation of the human spirit. Great book!
- 2008-10-06, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Gross and utterly engrossing
- I am a professor, and use this book as a required text in one of my upper-level seminars. My students and I absolutely devoured this book. Its combination of primary accounts and statistics on the one hand, and its vivid, accessible writing style on the other, made for lively and enthusiastic class discussion. I highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for legitimate popular history on a fascinating, apocalyptic period in European history.
- 2008-10-02, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- The Great Mortality...the plague of 1348
- I started reading a book called the Black Death, which is so ponderous and boring, one would have to be a medieval monk to follow it. Then I found the Great Mortality, and it is so well written and organized, that I had no problem following the path of the bubonic plague that bedeviled Europe and Asia in the 1300s. One can't help wishing you could go back in time and tell everyone to kill rats, clean up the garbage and offal, and bathe once in a while. It was not an enlightened age.
- 2008-06-20, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Vivid, Brilliant, Alive
- The most extraordinary thing about John Kelly's book, The Great Mortality; an Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Times is how a book centered about Death can be so alive and vital. The multitude of compulsively readable, brilliantly written vignettes draw us into the lives of the people and we mourn their loss as we mourn those of people we know...my heart clenched when I read the concluding sentence of Agnolo of Turin's diary for 1348: "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands" What makes it so hard to bear even after all these centuries, is some of his previous diary entries: "Some of the dead were...so ill covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city."
Vivid pictures fill all the senses and make even the cities and towns unforgettable. Swaggering Marseilles, "a medieval Big Easy" where the lower part of the town, inhabited by the whole panoply of lower class, middle-class, tradesmen and medieval town-dwellers, smelled like "a mermaid with loose bowels" contrasts vividly with the papal pomp and aristocratic artistic life of Petrarch's Avignon.
And here is Cheapside, London: "Imagine a shopping center where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon, and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road, and you have Cheapside, the busiest, bawdiest, loudest patch of humanity in medieval England."
Books on the plague tend to be boring/horrific accounts of death in great numbers or scientific treatises on Y pestis; Kelly's well-researched book contains both the numbers and the science, but it, alone, of all the books I have read, makes the time itself live - 2008-05-26, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
