While Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion suggests that collective piety, sociability, and visiting were associated with the life-cycle events of childbirth and death, connections between homes were also sustained through daily preparations for death. This chapter argues that news of sickness and death was transmitted easily out of and into urban homes, and that this news had a discernible impact on the religious practices of other households in the neighbourhood, parish, or wider religious community. It is not concerned with the event or process of dying itself, but with how a community beyond the affected household responded to that fact. It argues that death made the walls of the urban home permeable. The awareness of an individual’s death, transmitted through word of mouth, or subsequently through the printing of a funeral sermon, entered the homes of others and had a perceptible influence on their daily religious practices. This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between two important functions of the home: firstly, the home as the site of most natural deaths, and secondly, the home as an important setting for daily religion.

This chapter analyses the structures of society through the changing faces of estate management, agricultural production, and long-distance trade. It reframes Merovingian society as one radically altered by new landholding patterns, resource utilisation, and tastes in consumption, rather than one trapped passively in post-Roman economic decline. The period still had its challenges, including poverty, pandemic, and environmental change. Our interpretation of the fragmentary and inconsistent evidence very much depends on the areas we choose to prioritise.

Amidst all of the ills that struck Antioch in the sixth century, the bubonic plague ranks high. This chapter addresses the actual entity of the pestilence, calling into question the reports in the ancient sources.

Modern theorists have seen the development of the concept of risk as reflecting a profound shift away from a belief in the divine determination of human fate. Modernity, it is also argued, has seen the introduction of new mega-risks, which are far larger than those before. The chapter challenges these views and argues both that the Romans were not simply fatalistic about the future, and also that it is impossible to quantify whether the ancients faced less risk.

This chapter addresses a topic – health – that has come to light in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bringing together animal studies and the medical humanities, the chapter examines key texts from Leo Africanus, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, and others to trace close historical and discursive relationships between human and animal health. Focusing largely on diseases thought to be what we would now call zoonotic, or transferable from nonhuman animals to humans, the chapter seeks to make apparent the significance of cross-species infections that, before antibiotics and most vaccines, helped shape literature, trade, health, and imperial order. Although rabies provided the most recognizable model of cross-species infection, the chapter begins with locust swarms, which offered many Christian writers a model for articulating global connections between pests and pestilence, then turns to shipboard rats, which, even before germ theory, were thought by many early moderns to function as harbingers of death and disease. Having demonstrated how deeply cross-species contagion was entangled with theological definitions about what it is be human, the chapter ends by exploring a little known topic – early modern and eighteenth-century cattle plague – and its implications for reimagining a multispecies medical posthumanities.

The chapter provides a reconsideration of a section in Martianus Capella’s Book 1, dedicated to the ‘failure of the oracles’ and culminating in a quotation of a prophylactic Apollinean oracle, attributed to Alexander of Abonouteichos. The author tries to reconstruct some possible lines of transmission of this oracle, at the same time highlighting how its allegorical framework helps to shed light on some aspects of the ongoing controversy between pagans and Christians, which took into account the thaumaturgical and therapeutic capabilities of the gods.

Chapter 3 considers the underlying narrative structures of Corippus’ epic and how the poet positions the campaigns of John Troglita in their wider context. The Iohannis surveys the events of circa 530–46 in a series of analeptic ‘flashbacks’. As a succinct verse history of North Africa between the late 520s and 546, these surveys differ wildly from contemporary imperial propaganda. This chapter argues that these accounts must be considered as meaningful responses to the recent past within Byzantine Africa and as functional parts of the Iohannis. It is argued that Corippus’ presentation of these counter-narratives created a space for the interrogation of a complex past which would otherwise have been unavailable to him.

The second part of the chapter looks at the prolepses in the Iohannis, where Corippus’ narrative moves from the narrated time of John’s campaigns to their anticipated resolution and the composition of the epic itself. This teleology is not only explored through many direct references to the coming Roman triumph, but also to the counterfactual ‘futures’ anticipated by the Moors. Corippus’ resolution of these accounts through authorial interjections help to underscore the inevitability of imperial victory while emphasizing the sense of crisis within the historical narrative.

The Black Death of the fourteenth century reduced Europe’s population by about two-thirds between 1348 and 1420. Since endowments of land and capital remained unchanged, standard economic theory predicts rising real wages, falling rents of land and capital, and hence a drastic reduction of economic inequality. All of this occurred in most of western Europe. Elites eventually yielded, serfdom ended, landowners shifted from labor- to land-intensive production (grazing displaced planting), and labor-saving inventions abounded. In Europe east of the Elbe, by contrast, a formerly free peasantry was reduced to serfdom and landowners specialized increasingly in grain production, much of it for export. A plausible reason for the divergent responses is soil and climate: western Europe was mostly suitable for sedentary animal husbandry, eastern Europe was not; and the two were separated by a sharp dividing line that lay only slightly west of the Elbe. Data on Prussian landholdings suggest a strong correlation between low suitability for animal husbandry and the prevalence of serf-cultivated estates. Western elites could engage in factor substitution; eastern ones could not.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter explores how the term sympathy was co-opted into political discourse in the first part of the seventeenth century, and how Jacobean literary and dramatic texts debated the political aspects of pity and compassion. Focusing on responses to the crises of succession and the plague, the chapter discusses the representation of sympathy in William Muggins’s Londons Mourning garment (1603), William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Croesus (1604), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). It argues that King Lear exposes the ethical and philosophical problems involved in emotional perspective-taking, and points to the ways in which concepts of sympathy in this period were complicated by an individual’s class and status. The chapter then turns to royal elegies from the 1610s and 1620s, including poetic responses to the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. The chapter also explores several religious works that express concerns about a decline of sympathy during this period, and proposes that the increased bleakness of the 1623 Folio text of Lear may reflect wider social anxieties about what Thomas Medeley calls ‘this iron and flinty age’.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

This chapter discusses responses to Thucydides’ History in the thousand-year period between the foundation of Constantinople in 330 CE and the appearance of the first translations of Thucydides in the late 14th century. The chapter describes the processes by which the text was preserved and transmitted and how it was read and understood in this period. It also explores the question of why the Byzantines were interested in Thucydides and the creative ways in which some Byzantine authors adapted or redeployed Thucydides’ work in their own writing.

Thucydides emphasizes the labour that he has put into creating his History, but this is a text that also requires labour from its readers if they are to uncover the truth about past events. This chapter explores what that process of uncovering the truth might look like using as case studies Thucydides’ account of the growth of Athenian imperial power in Book 1 and his narrative of the plague in Book 2. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of why Thucydides might have adopted this approach to writing and presenting his History.