Little Lester K., ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 380 pp.

Extract

With the rise of HIV and other “emerging diseases” having global reach over the past twenty years, interest in historic plague has flourished. The Justinianic plague in and around the Roman empire from a.d. 541 to 750, however, has received far less attention that the Black Death of 1348 and its recurrent strikes in Europe to the eighteenth century. This difference results in part from the comparative paucity of sources for the former and its greater linguistic demands, which require a knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern as well as Western languages. Because of these demands, Lester Little argues persuasively that a multiple-authored work by authorities in different parts of Europe is now needed before a single-authored synthesis can be adequately written.