Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface – The Black Death and Ebola: On the Value of Comparison
- Introducing The Medieval Globe
- Editor’s Introduction to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death
- Taking “Pandemic” Seriously: Making the Black Death Global
- The Black Death and Its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega: Lessons from History and Archeology
- The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarcheological Analyses of Epidemic Cemeteries
- Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt
- Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis
- New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters
- Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes and Medieval Plague: An Invitation to a New Dialogue between Historians and Immunologists
- The Black Death and the Future of the Plague
- Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy
- FEATURED SOURCE
- APPENDIX 1 Text of Omne Bonum, “De Clerico Debilitato Ministrante Sequitur Videre
- APPENDIX 2 Omne Bonum, “on Ministration by a Disabled Cleric”
- Bibliography
- Index
Introducing The Medieval Globe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface – The Black Death and Ebola: On the Value of Comparison
- Introducing The Medieval Globe
- Editor’s Introduction to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death
- Taking “Pandemic” Seriously: Making the Black Death Global
- The Black Death and Its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega: Lessons from History and Archeology
- The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarcheological Analyses of Epidemic Cemeteries
- Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt
- Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis
- New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters
- Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes and Medieval Plague: An Invitation to a New Dialogue between Historians and Immunologists
- The Black Death and the Future of the Plague
- Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy
- FEATURED SOURCE
- APPENDIX 1 Text of Omne Bonum, “De Clerico Debilitato Ministrante Sequitur Videre
- APPENDIX 2 Omne Bonum, “on Ministration by a Disabled Cleric”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
WHEN A CERTAING enoese mariner sailed southward to find the elusive Indies, he was guided by two favorite books. We know one as The Travels of Marco Polo: the product of a collaboration between that Venetian merchant-adventurer and his cellmate in a Genoese prison, a purveyor of popular romances named Rustichello of Pisa. This book was composed around 1298, in a literary creole designated today as “Franco- Italian,” but it was soon circulating widely in many different languages and editions. (There is no “original” text; the copy owned and annotated by that famous mariner was a later Latin translation.) The other book, attributed to one Johan (or John) de Mandeville, was published around the middle of the fourteenth century, in the French dialect then prevalent in England. It, too, survives in numerous variants, none of which is the “original” text. In its own time, the former work was often titled Le devisement du monde (The Description of the World), Le livre des merveilles (The Book of Marvels), or Il milione (The Million). The latter work was also known as Le livre des merveilles.
Along with their titles, these influential texts share some other salient characteristics: authorial and linguistic indeterminacy, a tangled history of transmission and reception, the tendency to imprint ancient imaginaries on a mesh of contemporary fantasy and observation. What were these books supposed to be about? How were they understood by generations of readers? To what extent do they constitute evidence for contemporary worldviews? Such questions are open to debate. In essence, these books are not travel narratives or practical manuals: they are mises-en-abyme. The mysterious conditions of their making underscore the challenges of knowing anything about the world they purport to describe—the difficulty, even, of talking about that world in terms that mirror its own conceptual categories. (“Franco-Italian,” “the French dialect of England,” the literary work as a fixed entity: all of these are anachronisms.) Yet like so many readers before me, I have drawn inspiration from one of these books.
On this topic, I’ve many times recalled something I heard when I was young, about how a brave man once left our parts in order to explore the world.
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- Pandemic Disease in the Medieval WorldRethinking the Black Death, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015