norman f cantor in the wake of the plague

We meet, among others, fifteen-year-old Princess Joan of England, on her way to Spain to marry a Castilian prince Thomas of Birmingham, abbot of Halesowen, responsible for his abbey as a CEO is for his business in a desperate time and the once-prominent landowner John le Strange, who sees the Black Death tear away his family's lands and then its very name as it washes, unchecked, over Europe in wave after wave.Ĭantor argues that despite the devastation that made the Plague so terrifying, the disease that killed more than 40 percent of Europe's population had some beneficial results. Cantor introduces a fascinating cast of characters. 'In the Wake of the Plague' presents a microcosmic view of the Plague in England (and on the continent), telling the stories of the men and women of the fourteenth century, from peasant to priest, and from merchant to king.

But what the Plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a haze of myths.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 afresh, as a gripping, intimate narrative. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren - the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the final, awful end by respiratory failure - are more or less accurate. Much of what we know about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, is wrong.

Norman f cantor in the wake of the plague