Prélude et conséquences de la Grande Peste

Before and After 1348: Prelude and Consequences of the Black Death,

Call for papers

Panel organized by Monica Green, email: monica.green@asu.edu.

The 14th-Century Society has very graciously permitted me to host a session on the Black Death at Kalamazoo next year. The ICMS/Kalamazoo meeting will be held, as it always is, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dates are 11-14 May 2017. Here’s the general information on the Congress: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress.

Abstract: The “new paradigm” of Black Death studies has adopted the findings of recent paleogenetics and evolutionary understandings of Yersinia pestis's late medieval genetic diversification to see the Black Death as a much broader epidemiological phenomenon than previously realized. Although Black Death narratives are usually told from the perspective of western Europe, it is in fact likely that much of Eurasia and North Africa was affected by the newly proliferating organism. And in many of those areas, we know now, plague “focalized,” becoming embedded in the local fauna and thus persisting for years, or even centuries, thereafter. This session invites work that looks both at the late medieval pandemic’s origins before 1348 (whether in China or other places in central Eurasia) and its after-effects, including the 1360-63 pestis secunda. Cultural as well as scientific approaches are welcome.

The official Call for Papers will be available from the conference organizers by mid to late July. It lists Debra Salata, of the 14th-Century Society, as the official contact person, but I would appreciate it if you could send proposals directly to me: monica.green@asu.edu. 

Paper proposals (a one-page abstract and a Participant Information Form) are due to session organizers by September 15. The links to information on this process and the Participation Information Form may be found at http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions.

Needless to say, submissions (and eventual presentations, if accepted) must abide by normal Congress rules: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/policies. You may wish to know that the newly created Contagions: Society for Historic Infectious Disease Studies will also be sponsoring two sessions, tentatively entitled "Historic Landscapes of Disease,” and "The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late Medieval World: A Roundtable on Bruce Campbell’s New Book.” For info on those sessions, please contact Michelle Ziegler, zieglerm@slu.edu.