Communities and Crisis ─ Bologna During the Black Death

Kelly (history, University of Missouri, Kansas City) goes beyond the chronicles and literary memoirs of the Plague in Italy. She has painstakingly researched the wills drawn up in Bologna in 1348, at the height of the epidemic, with a control study of wills made ten years previously. Her work turns up evidence that many of the suppositions made on the base of later stories are not borne out by the data. She found that families seem not to have deserted the sick, nor did neighbors. Many of the wealthy stayed in the town. The main mention of the plague in the records of the city council is proclamations remitting taxes because of the disaster. Kelly's study is an excellent example of the necessity of starting with primary records rather than secondary sources. Her appendices list the names of officials, testators and witnesses. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Shona Kelly Wray, Ph.D. (1999) in History, University of Colorado at Boulder, is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri--Kansas City. Her publications concern the experience of the Black Death and notarial culture in late medieval Bologna.