After the Plague by Simon Doubleday

After the Plague by Simon Doubleday

This Great Courses work spends about 25% of its length describing the Black Death and the rest looking at parts of Europe afterwards. There’s an effort made to connect the evolution of culture, literature, religion, and the economy to the trauma of the Black Death. Parts are very powerful, such as the exploration of the grief medieval parents felt when they lost a child. (This is especially important because there was a popular—if idiotic—idea in the historiography a hundred years ago that medieval parents couldn’t have loved their children like modern parents do because the high child mortality rates would have made it impossible to function if they had.) Overall, I was pleased with the breadth of Doubleday’s look at medieval society, but I didn’t really feel like he brought anything new to the table.