SE Academic Review 2023

46 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

It is interesting to note, however, that Green’s insights have not yet influenced many European medievalists’ treatment of the Black Death. That her arguments rely on genetic and economic hints, rather than contemporary proof, that sub-Saharan Africa experienced the Black Death in the mid-14th century might explain the lack of uptake from historians. However, this would be missing the point of her conclusions and methods. A window of opportunity has been opened due to the global implications of discoveries in genetic research, which provides significant potential to re-define the globality of the Black Death. It is through this window that medievalists need to start looking at the Black Death, and possibly more aspects of disease history for the sake of re assessing Europe’s experience and its connection with the rest of the world at the time. These considerations could be further developed in similar fields of history such as environmental and climatic studies. The availability of paleoclimatic data means that historians of medieval Europe can consider the extent to which climate was a causative element in disease history and, from a global perspective, how the experience of disease in Europe compared to that of individuals living in the climates of other regions. Bruce Campbell, for example, has compared global climate patterns to show that climate and disease were inextricably linked at the time of the Black Death, which together caused economic, political and cultural shifts in Europe (Campbell, 2016). Therefore, the emphasis of Green’s global approach to plague history is on the need for medievalists to widen the analytic lens. Comparative and connective global studies can re-construct the narrative of the Black Death and challenge existing conclusions about Europe’s experience, whilst simultaneously securing new opportunities to examine understudied areas of the pandemic’s history. broader field of global history a nuanced definition of what global societies in the past looked like. Caroline Dodds Pennock and Amanda Power recently published an emic study that illustrates these benefits (Pennock & Power, 2018). One benefit of Pennock and Power’s research is that it shows that societies of the medieval era had their own sense of being ‘global’ which was a feature of a ‘globalized’ way of life. The authors argue that because ‘global’ is a culturally specific concept which

was it that the Black Death provided a watershed moment for European hegemony but not for other territories? Pursuing questions such as these means that global comparisons of the consequences of the Black Death offers historians of medieval Europe a chance to re-assess, and potentially challenge, the conclusions that already exist about the disease. Connective studies of the Black Death issue another opportunity for historians of medieval Europe to show that vast, global trade networks existed during the Middle Ages. One of the reasons for assumptions of the medieval period as a pre-modern era is that long-distance trade is seen to have developed with colonial and industrial expansion from the 16th century onwards. However, the Black Death illustrates that long-distance trade across Eurasia in the 14th century was one of the chief causes of the spread of the disease. New arguments that sub-Saharan Africa also experienced plague due to trade connections across the Indian Ocean Basin would expand this trade network even further, showing that the Late Middle Ages witnessed an interconnected economy that spanned much greater parts of the globe than historians have acknowledged. For specialists of Europe in this period, this means that they can offer a challenge to presumptions that economic globalization took place with the advent of the early modern period. Connective studies of the Black Death that re draw its maps across new continents show that global economic trade was actually a medieval phenomenon, once again demonstrating that the Middle Ages was not a pre-modern era that lacked the global features of later centuries. III In contrast to Green’s positivist methods for diagnosing historic instances of disease, historians of medieval Europe have also completed emic research on a global scale to analyse features of the Middle Ages. Emic studies seek to recreate the past in the way it was understood by individuals at the time. The main benefit of this method of global history rests on its ability to show that people of the Middle Ages were consciously engaged in globalizing activities because they lived among ‘global’ networks. This gives medievalists the chance to contribute to the