Historiographical Assignment 1

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The Historian’s Toolkit
Historiographical Assignment
10 October 2021

Source Analysis 1

Janna Coomans, ‘Food offenders: Public health and the marketplace in the late medieval Low
Countries’ in Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe, ed. Claire Weeda and
Carole Rawcliffe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 121-48

Janna Coomans’ extensive chapter on food regulations in Netherlandish cities during the late
medieval period demonstrates crucial understandings about the urban dialogue between political
and commercial spheres, along with a deeper apprehension of health safety before the period of
the second plague pandemic. She notes that council authority strongly mandated food health and
regulation to prevent diseases and illnesses, in line with the Galenic theories of the time.
Additionally, Coomans observes the relationship of city officials and food traders, the type of
food health regulations, and the severity of these regulations focusing on the cities of Ghent,
Ypres, Gouda, and Leiden. She claims that although urban city development in medieval Europe
has been studied, the abundance of evidence regarding food health has mostly been left
untouched.

Coomans presents her argument by looking at archival council laws and accounts regarding food
health. She notes the specific requirements for food, especially meat and bread, to be considered
adequate for trade at the marketplace. Ordinances, bylaws, and a high percentage of fines on
food traders recorded in Ypres and Ghent shows that food laws were commercially political.
Symbolic and performative penalties were also imposed, some as far as suspension from trade
within the city. All of Coomans’ sources thoroughly support her claim regarding urban factors in
line with health concerns pre-plague. Coomans does mention a spike in penal records from
Leiden during certain outbreaks of the second plague pandemic, as control intensified and new
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laws for identification of contact with the disease were introduced, which could suggest
increased regulation for food health, although this is not true for all outbreaks.

Cooman’s research pushes the agenda that health and safety regulations existed in urban settings
in the Low Countries before the time of the Black Death. Governance for the common good
meant an understanding of preventive methods, showing that health and sanitation were not just
realisations during and after the second plague pandemic. This presents a perspective on the need
to access primary sources on urban theory for comprehension of the Black Death cooperatively
with other methods of epidemiology.

Word Count: 345

Source Analysis 2

Nahyan Fancy and Monica H. Green, ‘Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)’, Medical History
65.2 (2021), 157-77

Fancy and Green provide a revisionist view on what could be the origins of the Black Death.
They claim that the epidemic that emerged after Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258 could rewrite
the timeline of the second plague pandemic, however, the incongruousness of concepts, such as
epidemic and plague, for chronological scholars, medical and theological writers, caused
disconnections that persisted after the much wider-known beginning of the Black Death, 1346.
The authors also note how multiple authors differed in understandings of what constitutes a
plague, and its symptoms and causations.

Fancy and Green present their argument by crucially breaking apart the writings of scholars from
1258 to 1470 and dividing them into four generations. They scrutinised the number of times the
words wabāʿ (epidemic) and ṭāʿūn (plague) is used by the scholars, and in what contexts. The
first and second-generation authors noticed the spread of an epidemic-like disease in Baghdad,
Damascus, and Cairo, amongst other regions in Syria and Egypt. These scholars also claim that
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such disease, wabāʿ, erupted due to corruption in the air caused by the mass killings of the
population of Baghdad, leaving a stench, which then travelled to Syria and Egypt by winds.
Surprisingly, the connection to Baghdad and the siege is lost by the fiftieth century as noted in
the fourth generation of writers. Writings by physicians during mid-thirteenth century record
newer symptoms, unknown to Arabic plague literature of the past, and claim the swelling under
the armpit as a ‘plague bubo’. Fancy and Green note the distinction of terms regarding this, and
how it carries forward in chronological writing. The later plague writers in Egypt and Syria do
recognise plague to be miasmatical, they classify the ṭāʿūn as widespread, much more than the
1258 outbreaks in Baghdad, Syria, and Egypt, adding to reasons why the primary outbreak is not
mentioned in fifteenth-century writing.

Fancy and Green’s well-structured study opens new levels to historiographical research, and they
do state that the lack of plague reservoirs from 1258 in Baghdad does hinder their claim.
However, it is in no way necessary to ignore Arabic writings to better the chronology of the
Black Death, as it reshapes our entire understanding on its origin.

Word Count: 367

Total Word Count: 712