ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. By John Aberth. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xii, 304. $26.00.

Extract

Books on disasters will never go out of fashion, and overarching syntheses of the really major catastrophes of human history are a publisher's dream. John Aberth offers his own rather idiosyncratic synthesis of what is generally termed the “crisis” of the later Middle Ages. This was a period that included a major famine (1315–1322) and other significant, though somewhat more localized, shortages. There were seemingly interminable wars, the Hundred Years War being the most famous, in which the long intervals of truce, with unpaid troops harrying the land, were worse than the formal campaigns. And there was plague: first the Black Death of 1347–1351, and then revisitations of pestilence (plague, presumably, but other devastating diseases as well) in nearly every generation for the next three hundred years.