John Aberth
Autor(a) de The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents
About the Author
John Aberth (Ph.D., Cambridge University) is an independent scholar based in Roxbury Vermont. He has taught at a number of institutions in Vermont and at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and at Skidmore College. He has published several books, including A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on mostrar mais Film; From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages; and Plagues in World History. He is at work on Doctoring the Black Death: Medieval Europe's Late Medieval Medical Response to Epidemic Disease and a new history of the Black Death. mostrar menos
Obras por John Aberth
The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents (2005) 174 exemplares
From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (1804) 97 exemplares
Contesting the Middle Ages: Debates that are Changing our Narrative of Medieval History (2018) 7 exemplares
John and the One-Eyed Horse 1 exemplar
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1963
- Sexo
- male
- Organizações
- Castleton State College
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425- John Aberth was born in New York City and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and (during the summer) in Roxbury, VT. He attended Hamilton College in New York for his B.A. in Creative Writing and also did a junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he studied Medieval History. He received his M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds in England and his Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge, England. He has taught full-time at Norwich University in Vermont, Skidmore College in New York, and at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and part-time at various colleges in Vermont, including Middlebury College, the University of Vermont, St. Michael's College, Castleton State College, and Champlain College. He is the author of seven books on Medieval History, mostly focusing on the Black Death of the late Middle Ages. He lives in Roxbury, VT with his wife, Laura, two cats, and six horses.
http://www.amazon.com/John-Aberth/e/B...
Membros
Críticas
This is a short text from my daughter's history course at uni last year. It focuses on four pandemics in history: The Black Death in Europe (1347-1350), the American Holocaust-- Smallpox (1518-1670), Bubonic & Pneumonic Plague in India & China (1896-1921), and AIDs in Sub-Saharan Africa (1982-2007). Each section is divided into two parts. The first looks at the event, the disease, social consequences, etc. and the second section is key primary sources from the time. All very interesting and readable. This is a history text, not a science text, which aligns with my way of learning.
Rating: At least four stars. There aren't any reviews of this in LT, and only one other rating, which is one star. This baffles me--that rating would mean the book was horribly written (definitely not) or flat out wrong (also not). I'm guessing that person either had to read this for a class that he hated, or something in the text offended his colonialist white privilege.… (mais)
Rating: At least four stars. There aren't any reviews of this in LT, and only one other rating, which is one star. This baffles me--that rating would mean the book was horribly written (definitely not) or flat out wrong (also not). I'm guessing that person either had to read this for a class that he hated, or something in the text offended his colonialist white privilege.… (mais)
5 
Nickelini | Apr 28, 2016 |
Nickelini | Apr 28, 2016 | 
Not as in-depth as I had hoped it would be.
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 11
- Membros
- 450
- Popularidade
- #54,506
- Avaliação
- 3.6
- Críticas
- 3
- ISBN
- 36
However, in the latter half of the book, as Aberth shifted from a focus on the history of the transmission and spread of the plague in the fourteenth century to looking at the social and economic impact of the Black Death, I found myself at times uneasy with his framing. While Aberth does acknowledge the presence of Jewish and Muslim people in medieval Europe, he also has a tendency to use "European" or "medieval people" as simple synonyms for "Christian." Not every person in the Middle Ages who was dying from the plague feared dying without making a last confession to a priest.
Most uncomfortable for me though was the chapter in which Aberth deals with the pogroms which occurred against Jewish people 1348-51, when Christians slaughtered thousands of people, mostly Jewish, out of the entirely incorrect belief that they were poisoning water supplies and so the cause of the Black Death. Aberth states that in "renaming what are usually called the 'Jewish pogroms' during the Black Death [as...] the artificial poison conspiracy", he is "obviously courting controversy." (169) Aberth argues that since not everyone who was killed during these incidents was Jewish, it's imprecise to refer to these as (or only as) pogroms. It is true that there were Christians—even Christian religious—who were attacked or killed out of suspicion that they were in someway deliberately causing the plague. But for Aberth not to make clear that the vast majority of those who were killed were Jewish seems disingenuous (especially since he acknowledges that many Christians who were targeted were so on the basis of a claimed conspiracy with Jews), or to state that poisoning accusations weren't really driven by anti-Semitism because Jews who had converted to Christianity were also accused (170) seems to me at best wildly naive about the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.
Worse, Aberth then goes on to write that "the charge of well poisoning that was invariably leveled against the Jews during the Black Death was not grounded in any religious beliefs about the Jews but rather had a perfectly rational, one might say almost scientific, explanation" (170) and that there was a "rational foundation behind the poison charge." (171) Even if you give Aberth the benefit of the doubt here and read this as him saying that the specific nature of the poisoning accusations were framed in terms of how physicians in the Middle Ages thought poison worked (naturally occurring poisons in water, air, or food were believed to spread plague), this is an almost breathtakingly irresponsible way for him to make that point. (Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise.)
After all, "rational" and "scientific" are terms which today have positive connotations, and undoubtedly the students who are the most likely audience for this book will read this as Aberth at least partly absolving European Christians for their behaviour. But neither are neutral terms, nor ones which can be divorced from the societal contexts which give rise to them. ("Scientific racism"—the pseudoscience used to justify U.S. chattel slavery, apartheid, eugenics, and the Holocaust—has its own (flawed) internal logic and even has the word "scientific" in its name. It's still bullshit!)
More bewilderingly, Aberth then writes that the fact that many persecutors wanted "to completely eliminate the Jewish presence from Europe" shows that the poison accusations weren't primarily motivated by anti-Semitism, because "[w]hile such 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism was, of course, related to the victims' Jewishness, in the context of the Black Death it more truly reflected, I believe, the unprecedented ferocity of the disease" and the poisoning "implied a threat not just to the local community but to the entire civilized world." (172-73) I cannot wrap my head around the point he seems to be making here—the best I can make of it is a distinction without a difference, at worst this reads like the medievalist equivalent of saying "it was economic anxiety." (It wasn't economic anxiety. It was racism with a side-order of sexism.)
This is probably the most I've ever written about four pages in a 400 page book, but that's how bad a taste they left in my mouth. I might use a couple of individual chapters from this with students, most likely the first two chapters, but I can't see myself using the book as a whole without some very careful scaffolding.… (mais)