Book Review: The Great Mortality by John Kelly

When John Kelly began to write The Great Mortality, he thought he was going to write a book about the possibilities of future pandemics, the bird flus and the SARS epidemics and the ebolas that flare up, cause media panic, and retreat (at least so far). In his research, Kelly sought out the history of pandemics and he found himself mesmerized by the first-hand plague accounts from the 14th century, the stories of those who lived through (and died in) the devastating European plague outbreak often referred to as the Black Death. Kelly uses these human experiences of the disaster as the backbone to the book, and they support the book's scientific and historical flesh. With The Great Mortality, Kelly has created a very human book about some of the most trying times humanity has yet to encounter.

The bubonic plague didn't just decimate the medieval population; it almost obliterated it. In some cases, up to two thirds of the population of towns died from the flea-born disease. Lovers, parents, children, friends — all these relationships became unstable because of death, or the fear of death. According to Kelly, only World War II ranks higher on the "Foster scale," a scale that allows one to compare the cumulative impact of death, destruction, and suffering to measure the degree of a human catastrophe. These were, simply put, the worst of times.

Like most dark times, the plague came just as Europe was starting to awaken to a hangover, the kind that occurs when society assumes that its growth is endlessly sustainable. In some places, the plague was prefaced by famines, a sign of the ever-increasing demands of medieval society:

In the autumn of 1347, when the Black Death arrived in Europe, the continent was caught in a Malthusian deadlock. After two and a half centuries of rapid demographic growth, the balance between people and resources had become very tight. Nearly everywhere, living standards were either falling or stagnating; poverty, hunger, and malnutrition were widespread; social mobility rare; technological innovation stifled; and new ideas and modes of thinking denounced as dangerous heresies. The autumn morning that the Genoese plague fleet sailed into Messina harbor, a thick layer of congealed gel lay over an immobilized Europe.

These were the very conditions that plague needed to thrive, particularly increased mobility and decreased standards of living, with its inevitable effects on the already iffy hygiene standards of the day. This was, after all, a time when clothing was so rarely changed that Kelly declares "Hi, the fleas bite me so" to be "another useful phrase in the fourteenth-century English-French dictionary."

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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