Pandemics & Society Seminar, 20 February: Surviving the Black Death: Social Connectivity and Disease Modelling in Medieval England
For the first Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Alex Brown (Durham University). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 20 February at the normal time (1600 CET). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Abstract
This talk introduces our new Leverhulme-funded project: ‘Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England’. The Black Death of 1348–9 stands ‘unchallenged as the greatest disaster in documented human history’, yet the characteristics of the disease that killed approximately half the population of Europe in just a handful of years have long confounded academics. Although largely thought to be caused by Yersinia pestis, it is still unclear how the disease spread so quickly in a preindustrial society. We will introduce our project which hopes to use the latest computer modelling developed in response to the COVID-19 outbreak to simulate the spread of the Black Death in England. Using historical and archaeological sources, we will reconstruct the broad characteristics of the late medieval population on the eve of the Black Death, such as their location, age, sex, and occupation. This is the ‘static’ part of our model. We will then infer their ‘dynamic’ behavioural patterns, such as where they spent their time and whom they encountered in their daily lives. Our primary objectives are to establish how the Black Death spread, the likely means of its transmission, and what this reveals about social connections in medieval society.
About the Speaker
Dr Alex Brown is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at Durham University and is currently the Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-funded research project, ‘Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England’. He has published widely on the economic and social history of late medieval England.