Norman F. Cantor published In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made some 3 years before his death in 2004. He was and continues to be highly regarded as a scholar of the Middle Ages, so if I see any of his works at the used bookstore, I usually pick them up. In the Wake of the Plague is the first book of his that I’ve read in full, but I was not impressed by the quality of the work. The book reviewers weren’t kind to this book for good reason, but I’m looking forward to reading his other publications.
Dr. Cantor’s main goal in approaching the subject of the Black Plague is a compelling one. While he does spend some time discussing the modern medical perspectives on the plague (one word: anthrax), as well as information from contemporary doctors and apothecaries musing on its causes and manifestations, he focuses on tracing the effects of the plague throughout late medieval England. England’s population at the time was 6 million, and it would be so decimated in the late 1340s that it would only approach that population level again in 1650. After setting a broad context for the Black Death, Cantor moves into the minutiae of medieval life in England, and how the social and cultural fabric of a kingdom was torn apart.
Cantor devotes an entire chapter to the death of Princess Joan of England (1348), whose passing ruptured a planned marriage alliance between England and Castile in the beginning decades of the Hundred Years’ War. Through this singular event Cantor shows how the Black Death easily undid some of the most involved political machinations of the time. It goes without writing that this singular event contributed to this catastrophe lasting into the fifteenth century. Even when English aggression crossed the borders of Castile, its conquered lands weren’t sufficient to speed the House of Plantagenet towards victory.
The Black Death also ripped wreaked similar havoc on social relationships and ambitions. Cantor turns his attention, in a memorable chapter, to the English gentry. There were approximately 500,000 gentry in England, a number that would be halved after the passage of the plague. Landowners would succumb to infection and die, leaving behind a dowager; these widows had legal claim on one third of the income (i.e., not the extant holdings) for the rest of their lives. Cantor describes how the peculiarly unfortunate le Strange family lost male family members in three episodes of of the plague and left behind a string of dowagers. In the legal chaos that followed, members of the family fought to keep the family line from passing into obscurity. Understandably, in this turbulent social setting many families sought out lawyers to protect their assets from legal claims that would have been routinely honored in the years before the plague. Cantor finds here that the Black Death “contributed to the advent of an era of rural capitalism, unceasing aggressive litigation, and the conviction that unrestrained greed is good.” Hyperbole pardoned on account of his previous contributions to medieval history, there is something to be said for the Black Death as a massive legal, economic, social, and political interruption.
Despite the value of these observations, the quality of his book has been blasted. The most popular criticism is that the book clearly lacked an editor, or that Cantor gave up the responsibility of editing himself. Cantor spends nearly as much time writing his way down tangents as he does talking about the main subject matter of the book. But the tangents here are true tangents, and not merely arcs that return to the original line of investigation. Cantor blazes a trail in one direction and leaves the reader at a dead end. But worse than this are his frequent sneers at medieval politics, culture, and beliefs. In one paragraph he baldly attacks medieval moral capacity. ”Fourteenth-century people lacked the moral categories that could transcend political and social roles.” The prevalence of sarcastic remarks, for example his reference to Princess Joan as a “top drawer white girl”, lead the reader to question whether the book was an attempt at history or an attempt at wit. These comments are so prevalent that one would be better off reading another text for a foundational understanding of the influence of the Plague. In the Wake of the Plague deserves to be skimmed.
