In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

Norman F. Cantor

HarperCollins, Apr 16, 2002 - History - 272 pages

The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, takingmillion lives. And yet, most of what we know about it is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was and how it made history remain shrouded in a haze of myths.

Now, Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - LibraryCin - LibraryThing

In this book, Cantor looks at the Black Death that hit Europe in the mid-1300s. It is mostly attributed to the plague, but Cantor suggests it might not only have been the plague; there might have been ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - MarthaJeanne - LibraryThing

This is an interesting, insightful and ultimately unsatisfying book. One major improvement would have been to move all the comments aimed at gaining the attention of American law students who know nothing of European history to the footnotes.

About the author

Norman F. Cantor was Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at New York University. His many books include In the Wake of the Plague, Inventing the Middle Ages, and The Civilization of the Middle Ages, the most widely read narrative of the Middle Ages in the English language. He died in 2004.

Bibliographic information

• Title: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
• Author: Norman F. Cantor
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: HarperCollins, 2002
• ISBN: 0060014342, 9780060014346
• Length: 272 pages
• Subjects: History / Medieval; History / World; Medical / History