Excellent study of the bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world during the mid-14th century. Kelly traces the lineage of the disease, its origins and the way it traveled all over the known world. Beginning in Asia and making its way to Italy, Kelly shows its progression through Europe chapter by chapter, discussing how the plague affected politics, economics and social patterns and traditions. Kelly gives an excellent overview of the devestation the Black Death had on the population, and how it changed the world. ( )

A history of the first outbreak of plague in Europe. The author's reasoning
about biology is weak. The tale is competently told, but offers nothing
new. ( )

In the bonus section of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time author John Kelly discusses three people who brought the period of Europe's Black Death to life for him. The first is Jacme De Podio, a peasant from Marseille. After Jacme's son, grand-daughter and daughter-in-law all died from the plague, he decided he should inherit his daughter-in-law's estate. To do so he had to find two witnesses who would swear out in court that she had died. Jacme spent two years searching the plague ravished city of Marseille, finally found the witnesses he needed and inherited the estate. Carpe Diem.

The second was Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. One of the major celebrities of 14th century Europe, Queen Joanna stood accused of murdering her husband so she could marry her lover. Her trial in the Papal court at Avignon was the must see event of the day, drawing a crowd from every corner of the continent in spite of the plague that ravaged the land. She was found innocent, though later her former in-laws invaded her kingdom forcing her to flee to Provence where she was reuinted with her lover. The third is Agnolo di Tura called Agnolo the Fat. Agnolo, a hard-working man who rose from the lower classes to the upper middle class prior to the plague, wrote one of the better chronicles of the Black Death which sums up the plagues full horror, "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."

The Black Death, called the Great Mortality by those who lived through it, was the greatest tragedy ever to befall Europe. (Whether or not its death toll was worse than that of World War II depends in part on how you manipulate the statistics.) While it brought about an end to the lives of millions, the Black Death changed the course of European history and laid the groundwork for the Renaissance.

Mr. Kelly's book is a thorough and entertaining account of the Black Death from its origins to its after effects. While he presents the historical facts and the scientific details along with the numbers needed to understand the profound effects the Black Death had, Mr. Kelly's focus on the individual people of the time brings the story home as it brings the story to life. The story of the Black Death is full of scoundrals, heroes and everyone in between. Agnolo di Tura will be familiar to anyone who remembers what they studied in middle school, but others, like Queen Joanna of Naples have been kept out of the history books for one reason or another. Hers is one of many fascinating stories in The Great Mortality.

The Great Mortality is a history book for both lovers and non-lovers of history. While there is enough detail in The Great Mortality to answer all but the most obscure questions anyone might have about the Black Death, the book never becomes lost in arcane information or bogged down in academic language. The story of The Great Mortality is always interesting, often moving, and at times inspiring. That all of Agnolo di Tura's children died moves the reader, but so does the knowledge that he carried on in spite of this. In fact, he remarried and became successful enough to complain about his worker's demands for higher wages. ( )

The Great Mortality is a synthesis of more specialized scholarly texts using some of the latest creative non-fiction techniques to make it more accessible for the general reader. Due to the nature of the sources, the Black Death is actually a very difficult subject matter to turn into a readable narrative - as so many failed past attempts can attest - and this is probably the best there is at the moment. Kelly covers the main themes: outbreak and origins, biology, depopulation, social and economic effects, persecutions, religion. There are end-notes (no in-line footnote), but oddly no bibliography, or no Further Reading, such as a list of modern literature about the Black Death.

Kelly makes some large leaps towards the end about the consequences of the Black Death, namely, by de-populating Europe, the Black Death ushered in the Early Modern Era with an emphasis on labor saving devices. Although this conclusion seems like common sense, it is problematic on a number of fronts - not the least being the Black Death was only one of many reasons for a demographic decline in the Late Middle Ages. As well, scholarship is actually divided if the Black Death really had any major consequences at all - it is one of the great questions of history. For the most part things just continued on as they had - the Hundred Years War took a short break then picked right back where it left off, etc.. Kelley doesn't question or go into all the finer details of his conclusions. It's very easy, too easy in a popular history book, to reach sweeping conclusions about the books subject matter "changed the world" (so many books have sub-titles to that effect), the difficult part is to prove it and I'm not sure Kelly has fully represented the scholarship. He does do an excellent job of representing the most recent debate about what caused the Black Death (plague or some other disease).

Overall I found the book highly readable, but nothing particularly new and some of the conclusions are sweeping in what was a very complex period. I've read much about it already in survey texts and encyclopedia articles, but Kelly goes into enough detail, with quotes from primary sources, to make it more tangible. If you want a "one book" on the subject without needing specialized knowledge of the Middle Ages this is probably the best there is.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )