New Explanatory Frameworks and Black Death Forgetting

Dodds, Ben

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-89058-2_6

Ben Dodds²

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Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, new and important research was carried out in which the role of the Black Death in historical change was questioned. Female scholars including Elizabeth Levett and women working for the Victoria County History were particularly important in these developments, partly because of the exclusion they experienced in academic institutions. From the 1930s, M. M. Postan, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton and others developed broader explanatory frameworks for historical change in the late middle ages in which the Black Death played a limited role. This scholarship, along with historical fiction set in the fourteenth century, demonstrate a process of Black Death forgetting, meaning not that the Black Death was suddenly ignored but rather that its role in cultural memory was reduced.

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Notes

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Department of History, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
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Dodds, B. (2022). New Explanatory Frameworks and Black Death Forgetting. In: Myths and Memories of the Black Death. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89058-2_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89058-2_6
Published: 12 December 2021
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