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.
1. Introduction.- 2. Rediscovering the Black Death.- 3. The Black Death and Englishness.- 4. Plague in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.- 5. The Black Death and War in the Mid-Twentieth Century.- 6. New Explanatory Frameworks and Black Death Forgetting.- 7. Imagining Victory Over the Black Death.- 8. Denial, Climate Change and New Evidence about the Black Death.- 9. Conclusion.
Ben Dodds is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University, USA.
