Pandemic in the Medieval World: Teaching a New Black Death Narrative in the 21st Century (Green, Barnhouse, Black, & Beattie)
- mmapodcast1
- 10 hours ago
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How do pandemics happen? In this episode, historians of medieval medicine Monica H. Green, Winston Black, and Lucy Barnhouse talk with Will Beattie about the genesis of a new open-access teaching module on the Black Death. Our understanding of the late medieval pandemic has been transformed not only because of advances in the biological sciences, but also because historians have recently discovered—or newly interpreted—written records from the 13th and 14th centuries. For the first time, the Islamicate world’s experience is centered in the narrative, allowing entirely new perspectives on the Afro-Eurasian pandemic to be revealed.
Monica H. Green is an Independent Scholar and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy. For the past two decades, she has worked to bring her skills as a historian of science and medicine to a completely new conceptualization of the late medieval plague pandemic, of which the late 1340s Black Death was just the crescendo, not the beginning.
Winston Black currently holds the Gatto Chair in Christian Studies at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where he has been developing a Historical Health Traditions program. A specialist in high medieval history of European medicine and religion, he is the author of numerous books, including (with Lucy Barnhouse) Beyond Cadfael: Medieval Medicine and Medical Medievalism (2023).
Lucy Barnhouse is Assistant Professor of History at Arkansas State University in Little Rock. A historian of medieval hospitalsand the author of Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland (2023), Barnhouse has developed multiple new approaches to teaching both in the classroom and beyond, including podcasting. In 2025, she held the Olivia Remie Constable Award of the Medieval Academy of America.
Will Beattie is a researcher of apocalypticism and early medieval England. He received his PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame, and his dissertation explored the embedding of eschatological imagery in local landscape and history. In addition to The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, Will is co-creator and editor of Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast.
References/Further Reading:
Fancy, Nahyan, and Monica H. Green. “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258),” Medical History 65, no. 2 (April 2021), 157-177, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2021.3.
Green, Monica H. “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 2020), 1600-1631. This includes the online-only supplement, “Marmots and Their Plague Strains,” https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa511; https://doi.org/10.17613/7020-8j08.
Green, Monica H. The Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic through the Eyes of Ibn Battuta, an open-access course module, History for the 21st Century (H21) Project, 01 Sep 2025, https://www.history21.com/owit-module/the-black-death-the-medieval-plague-pandemic/, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/qeznz-tcx61.
Green, Monica H., and Nahyan Fancy. “Plague History, Mongol History, and the Processes of Focalisation Leading up to the Black Death: A Response to Brack et al.,” Medical History 68, no. 4 (Fall 2024), 411-435, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.29.
Horrox, Rosemary, ed. and trans. The Black Death (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994).
Omar, Muhammed, and Nahyan Fancy. “Mamluk Maqāmas on the Black Death,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 25, no. 4 (2025), special issue on Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives, 151-181, https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/12790.