Plague Ideas in Transition: Shifting Medical Ideas and Practices of the Islamicate World in Response to Recurring Plague Outbreaks

The essay conducts a wide review of the existing modern scholarship on plague, caused by Yersinia pestis, during the second plague pandemic in the Islamicate Mediterranean. A historiographical approach was taken to analyze the terminology recorded in scholarly plague treatises across the timeline of the historical narrative, from the centuries before during and after the 1348 plague pandemic known as the Black Death. Focus is given to the medical and symptom-based terminology that was used by medieval scholars to describes plagues arrival, appearance, and effects. Modern authors writing about regions from Anatolia and the Ottoman lands in the eastern Mediterranean, to the Andalusian region in Spanish Granada have translated and discussed major medieval treatises by scholars who were contemporary to the disease epidemics and this essay explores the medieval terminology using modern scholarship. An analysis of the detailed modern plague scholarship in the eastern Islamicate Mediterranean explores the interpretations and discussions generated by the numerous sources who wrote historical and religious treatises on plague during the initial pandemic and subsequent epidemic events. In the western Islamicate Mediterranean a trio of detailed treatises describe the symptoms and treatments for an unprecedented pandemic, providing unparalleled descriptive confirmation of the presence of plague related mortality. This western record is limited, however, by its finite temporal range, as no plague treatise arise from the Islamicate scholars in the western Mediterranean kingdoms to describe the events before or after the famous 1348 pandemic. Between the kingdoms in the east and west is a wasteland in the medieval scholarship on plague, its plague experience largely explained only in comparison with the adjacent regions. With this background the essay will seek the patterns and notable features in scholarly terminology, in order to create a coherent picture of the plague experience across the Islamicate Mediterranean.