Counting the dead

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In attempting to establish the human toll of the Black Death and calculate mortality rates on different scales, contemporary historiography is not only seeking to measure the demographic impact of the epidemic. It is confronting the very notion of quantification, the practical rationalities of medieval measurement of a multitude, and the place of numbers in catastrophe narratives. By taking seriously the idea that the plague " fait " of the dead, we ultimately question the discordance of time.

Saving the fall of Machiavelli's text, saving time, saving ourselves
Is the historian the diagnostician of the present? Ernst Bloch and the discordance of time (Georges Didi-Huberman, Imaginer recommencer: Ce qui nous soulève 2, 2021)
The endemization of epidemic catastrophe: a critical time
"It's time to recover some old things, the urgency of the hour commands" (Ernst Bloch, Héritage de ce temps, 1935)
After the Black Death: Roaring Twenties or Roaring Twenties ? (James Westfall Thomson, "The Aftermath of the Black Death and the Aftermath of the Great War", American Journal of Sociology, 1921)
D'une après-guerre l'autre (Yves Renouard, "Conséquences et intérêt démographique de la Peste de 1348", Populations, 1948)
War kills, plague kills, frontier kills
Quand compter et raconter ne suffit plus : les fantômes du deuil et " l'œuvre de sépulture " (Pierre Fédida, "Compter les morts", L'Inactuel, 1994)
Where do the 94,000 dead in Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentine come from? Always the horrible beginning of the Decameron
Boccaccio tells of the plague so as not to count the plague's dead: politics of the innumerable, poetics of the implausible
"What illustrious lineages, what considerable inheritances, what famous riches were deprived of legitimate successors! the paradoxes of lineage historiography, from China to Africa
In South India too, the paradoxical indifference of karanam historiography (Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures du temps. Writing History in India, 1994)
The world is a commodity: quantification and measurement (Afred W. Crosby, The Measurement of Reality. Quantification in Western Society (1250-1600), 2004)
Rationalités pratiques et capacités comptables: pour " une histoire concrète de l'abstraction " (Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l'économie politique,^XVIIe-XVIIIe^siècles, 1994)
236,000 dead in Samarkand in 1349? (Nahyan Fancy and Monica Green, "Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)", Medical History, 2021)
Samuel (II, 24) and Chronicles (I, 21) Theological obstacles to medieval thinking on the multitude (Peter Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought, 2003)
Io che vidi queste cose per nullo numero ne potrei né saprei adequare (Giovanni Villani, about the flood of 1338)
"It is by no means certain that for a^14th-centuryman, the spectacle of collective suffering alone is enough to generate the overall meaning of an event" (Thomas Labbé, Natural Disasters in the Middle Ages, 2017)
The plague killed more people than were alive: of Florence's 94,000 inhabitants in 1347, according to Giovanni Villani
60% mortality? The fallacies of a European average (Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353. The Complete History, 2004)
In England, mortality rates varied locally from 19% to 80% (Mark Bailey, After the Black Death. Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England, 2021)
The poll tax of 1377: a look back at the Russell-Postan debate and the methodological optimism of "global weighings
"It covered the whole universe, but was not equally severe in all countries, for in some regions only the tenth part of men remained, in others the sixth, in others a third died, in others a quarter"(Petite Chronique de Saint-Aubin-d'Angers)
Italian chroniclers and the measure of the plague (Gabriele Zanella, "Italia, Francia e Germania: una storiografia a confronto", in La Peste nera: Dati di una realtà ed elementi di una interpretazione, 1994)
Spatial logics of global, discontinuous transmission
Pandemics, outbreaks, waves: the plague as a periodizing agent
Le Livre des passages des temps mortifères or La peste, capitale du XIVe^siècle : "The statistics drawn up at the instigation of Pope Clement VI put the death toll for the whole world at 42,836,486" (Johannes Nohl, Der Schwarze Tod. Eine Chronik der Pest 1348 bis 1720, 1924)