The story of its silences : The whole world of the plague

Can and should we fill in the blanks on the map of the epidemic's spread in Eurasia? By questioning the documentary silences of China, India and sub-Saharan Africa, we suggest that the archipelagic world of the Black Death should be apprehended between global history and connected histories. The discussion thus leads to questions of method, touching on the relationship between environmental history and narrativity, Big Data and documentary criticism, heterogeneity of sources and the paradigm of trace-based knowledge.

Contents

• The entire Middle Ages: the plague as an operator of periodization, spatiality and mundiality
• A world in archipelago: "the totality lives from its own details" (ÉdouardGlissant, Philosophie de la relation: poésie en étendue, 2009)
• An "unexpected and universal pestilence" (Robert d'Avesbury): the rumor of China
• " 1344. Fengxiang: drought and locusts, great famine, epidemic": low-noise Chinese sources, and the great crash of political ruptures after 1350 (Timothy Brook, The Leopard of Kubilai Khan. A World History of China, 2019
• In India, too, the silences of documentation (George Sussmann, "Was the Black Death in India and China?", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2011
• Distances, connections, transmissions and innate immunity: in the absence of Xenopsylla cheopis
• The plague in Aden in 1436: merchant networks and epidemic contagion in the Red Sea
• "In those days a plague arose against all the people, such as cannot be described" (Chronicle of Zar'a Ya'eqob)
• Les " soldats du fléau " dans l'hagiographie éthiopienne (Marie-Laure Derat, "Du lexique aux talismans : occurrences de la peste dans la Corne de l'Afrique du ^XIIIe au XVe^siècle ", Afriques, 2018)
• "Les têtes d'Ifé, abandonnées par " une population saisie d'effroi " ? (Gérard Chouin, in François-Xavier Fauvelle dir., L'Afrique ancienne, de l'Acacus au Zimbabwe, 2018)
• Une " exploration critique du silence " : abandons de sites archéologiques, transferts de population et transformations politiques (Gérard Chouin, " Fossés, enceintes et peste noire en Afrique de l'Ouest forestière (500-1500 AD) ", Afrique : Archéologie & Arts, 9, 2013)
• Africa gets the Black Death too: genetic research and world-history narratives (Monica H. Green, "Putting Africa on the Black Death map: Narratives from genetics and history", Afriques, 2018)
• The peak of the 1320s, a full world and a world-system
• The late Middle Ages in the age of global history (Bruce Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, 2015)
• Superimposing curves or establishing correlations: questions of method (Jean-Philippe Genet, "De la 'grande crise' à la 'grande transition': une nouvelle perspective?", Médiévales, 2019)
• Beau Moyen Âge or Medieval Climatic Anomaly ?
• A perfect storm : climate, ecosystems and societies
• Solar irradiance andENSO as determinants of last resort
• Rabi Levi ben Gershom and Jacob's staff, stories of a world-object (1342)
• Taking the stars' point of view or "making room for stories"? (William Cronon, Nature and Stories: Essays in Environmental History, 2016)
• Back to Jean-Noël Biraben (Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 1975), historical demography as a moral science
• Another methodological intrigue: how to transform a collection of documentary attestations of plague epidemics into a database of plague outbreaks (Ulf Büntgen, Christian Ginzler et al., "Digitizing Historical plague", Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2012)
• Hasty modeling and incomplete mapping (Joris Roosen, Daniel R. Curtis (de Leiden), "Dangers of Noncritical use of Historical Plague Data", Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2018)
• From the methodological optimism of French-style social history to the vertigo of Big Data : epidemiological modeling at the peril of source criticism (George Christakos, Ricardo Olea, Marc Serre, Hwa-Lung Yu and Lin-Lin Wang, Interdisciplinary Public Health Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: The Case of Black Death, 2015)
• The Middle Ages by the trail: a documentary regime
• Eadem die obiit : when death passes in a small account register (Givry, 1348)
• Le Tout-Monde de la peste au " vrac des horizons " : "...La certitude aussi que la plus infime de ces composantes nous est irremplaçable " (ÉdouardGlissant, La Cohée du Lamentin, 2005)