New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia

Since 2014, when The Medieval Globe first presented the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the Black Death as a global pandemic, the pace and intensity of research has intensified. This follow-up volume features two extended essays laying out evidence that the Second Plague Pandemic was already ravaging China by the second quarter of the thirteenth century-over a century before it made its appearance in the greater Mediterranean region.

In a core contribution, Robert Hymes presents an extensive analysis of Chinese medical texts, showing that physicians were adapting their terminology and treatments to the emergence of a virulent new disease: plague. In an overarching essay, Monica H. Green summarizes the current state of our knowledge about the timing and expanse of the Black Death, showing how combined evidence from genetics and a reconstructed documentary record can create a coherent new narrative of one of the largest, and longest, pandemics in history.