The Black Death Transformed, by Samuel K Cohn Jnr

How the Black Death gave new life to Europe

True historical scholarship rarely crosses the species barrier dividing academic communities from lay readers. Samuel K Cohn's delightfully readable subversion of the consensus regarding the Black Death and the Renaissance deserves to make the leap.

Cohn is a serious historian, but displays a journalist's instinct for the intriguing and colourful. We learn that a 14th-century Dominican friar, Bartolomeo of Ferrara, concluded that plague was the consequence of "massive rains of worms and serpents in parts of China".

The evidence that early European intellectuals were as stunned by the advent of plague as Britain's tabloids were by Aids, and equally prone to embrace preposterous theories about the cause, is charmingly narrated.

But Cohn does not deviate from his thesis, and as epidemiological detective he is convincing. People developed immunity to Black Death, something medically impossible with bubonic plague. Whatever it was, the new and ferocious disease which first assailed Europe between 1347 and 1352 was not the rat- and flea-borne bacillus with which modern science is familiar.

Having established this revolutionary claim, Cohn does not waste time with speculation as to what the Black Death really was. He is a historian, not a scientist, and he has bigger ideas to explore. Did the speed and confidence with which rational investigation and treatment of plague replaced pessimistic religiosity lay the foundations for the Renaissance?

Cohn demonstrates the remarkable speed with which plague explanations rooted in fear of divine retribution gave way to reasoned, secular inquiry. Declining mortality trends in waves of late medieval plague allowed doctors to become convinced they had devised effective regimes of prevention and cure. Thus 14th- and 15th-century physicians became the first professionals to believe that they had surpassed the genius of ancient authorities such as Hippocrates. The argument reverses the conventional assertion that death and disease lead to periods of miserable superstition. In Bratislava, Besançon, Danzig, Cologne and Rome, industrious men of medicine concluded that their experimentation and observation had liberated many from the apparently inescapable ailment.

The results were felt well beyond the realm of medicine. Human ingenuity, it seemed, was capable of combating the worst divine wrath could throw at it. Might the logic be applied to other fields of endeavour?

Cohn's thesis is that plague gave way to a sense of progress and even triumph over the natural order. Via meticulous reading of wills, burial records, chronicles and tracts, he shows that from Europe's most appalling episode of disease-borne mortality there emerged what we now call the Renaissance psychology.

The Black Death Transformed conveys an ambitious and ultimately convincing argument in precise, often amusing prose. Cohn displays a combination of academic rigour and the ability to render the complex intriguing. His book deserves to be read well beyond the senior common room: it is a model of the sophisticated made pleasing.