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Ole J Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353: the complete history, Woodbridge and Rochester, Boydell Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 433, illus., £30.00 (hardback 0-85115-943-5).
At first sight the subtitle of this book may seem somewhat pretentious. The author hastens to explain that this is not the case: the book is not and cannot be a definitive history. It is complete in the sense that it seeks to sum up present knowledge of the Black Death, how and when it spread, the mortality and the consequences. It aims at presenting the "Stand der Forschung". It is, however, not a very reliable guide. Even in the first part of the book, which considers the nature of the plague, this becomes apparent.
Benedictow has always been a strong advocate of the conventional retrospective diagnosis, which identifies late medieval and early modern plague with modern bubonic plague, a primarily tropical disease spread by rats and fleas, a diagnosis which originated with Alexandre Yersin himself. And Benedictow's dissertation (Plague in the late medieval Nordic countries, Oslo, 1992) was exactly...