Editor’s Preface: New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia

Summary

SINCE 2014, WHEN The Medieval Globe’s inaugural double issue presented the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the Black Death, the pace of research on the First (Justinianic) and Second Plague Pandemics has only intensified – alongside the development of new methods for extracting evidence of plague and other diseases from the archaeological, genomic, and documentary records. This special issue brings TMG once again to the cutting edge of Black Death studies, featuring a pair of companion articles by leading scholars who contributed to that original issue. And since they have both become members of this journal’s Editorial Board in recent years, I want to emphasize that each article has undergone the same rigorous, doubleblind peer review process that we observe for all submissions.

The first article is a monumental contribution by Robert Hymes, who presents the fruits of an intensive research project designed to substantiate the hypothesis he offered in 2014. Based on a meticulous survey and analysis of Chinese medical writings spanning nearly a millennium, Hymes offers proof that physicians were adapting their terminology and treatments to the emergence of a virulent new disease, identifiable as plague, beginning in the 1220s. Moreover, the first documented outbreaks of this disease, characterized by purulent lumps or sores, can be linked to the Mongol conquest of North China and a string of sieges, the first three documented between 1213 and 1222. This compelling evidence, carefully contextualized and very clearly explained for nonspecialists, suggests that the Second Plague Pandemic had already struck parts of Central and East Asia over a century before it made its reappearance in the greater Mediterranean region.

The second article is by Monica H. Green, whose scholarly vision and leadership was crucial to the success of that inaugural issue. Green locates Hymes’s findings, and their implications, within the broader developments of the past eight years, summarizing the extent of our current knowledge about the timing and expanse of the Black Death, and calling for more concerted interdisciplinary efforts to connect such evidence to the new evolutionary history of plague which is emerging from the combination of phylogenetic and palaeogenetic approaches. She thereby offers a generous and truly global perspective on the state of research, identifying the many methodologies and kinds of evidence that must be collected and integrated in order to write the history of an epidemic disease that, as we now know, has been impacting human societies for five millennia.