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Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. London: Arnold; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ? + 318 pp. 111. $65.00 (0-340-70646-5).
The Black Death Transformed has enjoyed considerable publicity-not surprising, perhaps, in an age where the threat of epidemic disease is so newsworthy. Nor has its author, Samuel Cohn, been modest about his claims. he contends that for a century and more historians have rushed to equate the magna mortalilas that first struck Europe in 1348 with bubonic plague, but have failed to consider the evidence carefully enough. all other historians have manipulated the facts to fit their theories, he insists, whereas by turning to the sources afresh and by comparing medieval and modern evidence he has been able to demonstrate that the Black Death cannot have been bubonic plague: its signs, symptoms, and epidemiologic behavior, he argues, are all inconsistent with descriptions of the twentiethcentury disease.
Cohn does not offer his own diagnosis of the mortalilas (sometimes he suggests it was a fast-spreading airborne disease [p. 209], sometimes a disease of poverty like cholera [p. 21O]), but his insistence that it absolutely cannot have been bubonic plague involves him in the same problems that any attempt at retrospective diagnosis must entail, problems that he simply does not appreciate. To what extent, for example, are the descriptive categories and characters of the fourteenth century really identical with those of the twentieth? Can one trust chroniclers and medieval physicians, Boccaccio or Guy de Chauliac, as accurate observers of a simple objective reality? Cohn seems to have little doubt that one can, and he uncritically accepts their writings as providing relatively unproblematic testimony of their practical experience (cf. pp. 67-68). Yet for someone who insists that medieval clinical accounts must be taken on their...