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How did I ever miss this?
I have only just found out about the existence of a book called The Black Death in the Middle East by Michael Dols. It was published in 1977 so it doesn't post-date my residence in the medieval history library.
A quick net search later shows that it's in the bibliogrphy for every course on the Black Death (that they have courses on it now is news enough, and the number is astonishing), but there seems to be exactly 3 copies in the world for sale. The cheapest of which is £85, and it's only that cheap because of the recent plummet of the US dollar - at last year's exchange rates it would be a lot more.
According to this letter in this weekend's Guardian review, it essentially makes impossible the new theories that the Black Death was not in fact a result of the various varieties (bubonic, pneumonic, septicaemic) of plague caused by Y. pestis. (As far as I'm aware, there's two: one from a historical and one from an epidemiological perspective. I haven't had a look at either - at least one is ridiculously expensive). The point being, that as usual European-centric writers didn't bother to see what the rest of the world had to say about a worldwide event.
For the most part, I miss having access to a major academic library less than I expected (our local public library is pretty good on non-fiction, and my to-read pile beggars belief anyway), but at the moment, I do. I know I could order any of these books on interlibrary loan through the public library, but it's just not the same.
A quick net search later shows that it's in the bibliogrphy for every course on the Black Death (that they have courses on it now is news enough, and the number is astonishing), but there seems to be exactly 3 copies in the world for sale. The cheapest of which is £85, and it's only that cheap because of the recent plummet of the US dollar - at last year's exchange rates it would be a lot more.
According to this letter in this weekend's Guardian review, it essentially makes impossible the new theories that the Black Death was not in fact a result of the various varieties (bubonic, pneumonic, septicaemic) of plague caused by Y. pestis. (As far as I'm aware, there's two: one from a historical and one from an epidemiological perspective. I haven't had a look at either - at least one is ridiculously expensive). The point being, that as usual European-centric writers didn't bother to see what the rest of the world had to say about a worldwide event.
For the most part, I miss having access to a major academic library less than I expected (our local public library is pretty good on non-fiction, and my to-read pile beggars belief anyway), but at the moment, I do. I know I could order any of these books on interlibrary loan through the public library, but it's just not the same.
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I should point out that they were working on a vaccine, which will be available for civilian use too.
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