Plague Historians in Lab Coats*

In 1998 a team of French scientists published a study demonstrating that the epidemic of infectious disease that struck Marseille in 1720–2, widely held at the time and ever since to be plague, was indeed plague.¹ Two years later, the same team made a similar claim about the so-called Black Death, which spread over Europe between 1347 and 1353.² Articles of this sort by various authors have continued to come out almost annually since 2000, always of course in scientific journals, but usually with a follow-up version in the popular press recast for a general audience. Neither the technical nor the popular versions have been offering much in the way of context, for example by showing how any one of the studies might relate to those reported previously. Attentive readers could thus well wonder what is so important about proving that past episodes of what was thought to be plague turn out to have been caused by plague; and wonder, too, whether each new article is not just more déjà lu.

As we might expect, the scientific articles adhere to the traditions of sobriety and brevity characteristic of their genre. Even so, there is a current of competitiveness that simmers just below the surface of some of them and occasionally boils over. In addition the entire enterprise has come under strong criticism by a few persons in outside yet related fields, and since most of the authors of the scientific articles in question have responded to their critics only sporadically, readers may also have been left wondering what lies behind the tensions they perceive.

The appearance of two articles in the autumn of 2010 brought a welcome break from this pattern. The first is the work of twelve authors representing seven countries — France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, …