Kelly talks of mortality rates as high as 60-70% in some places. These developments caused a lot of death and suffering themselves, and then the plague came along to make an awful situation that much worse. Not only that, but temperatures began to drop and the climate became unstable. But by the 14th century, the population was becoming too large for the amount of food people could produce and things began to stagnate. This was followed by a period of resurgence, when the population slowly grew, more and more farming took place, more food was grown, and living standards rose. He told the story of collapse after the fall of the Roman Empire, a period when the population dropped and plague was uncommon because it was harder for the virus to travel when fewer people were around. I was glad for all the information Kelly offered on what life in the 14th century was like, but I found myself particularly fascinated by the larger sweep of history he described. Often this meant vicious anti-Semitism Kelly tells of groups of people called Flagellants, for example, who traveled around whipping themselves and killing Jews, in the hope that this would somehow save them.

He covers the science of it pretty thoroughly - how the virus works, what it does to bodies (horrifying), how it travels - and then looks at various regions of Europe, telling how the plague affected each place differently and describing the various ways people responded to it.

Kelly gets repetitious at times, but generally he does a good job telling the story of how and where the plague developed (or at least our current theories on the subject) and how it spread through Europe and Asia. There’s something disturbingly enjoyable about learning how people in earlier times lived, especially in times as far from ours as the 14th century - to think about the isolated villages, the stinking cities, the primitive homes, the sharing of houses with farm animals, the near-complete absence of bathing, the lack of modern medicine.īut learning about the plague itself was fascinating too. Much of the interest this book held for me came simply from learning a little more about what life was like during the middle ages. I suppose that’s what inspired me to read it - to see just how horrifying a horrifying event can really be.

John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time is a very good book in a horrifying kind of way.

The great mortality by john kelly