In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (2001) by Norman F. Cantor

Norman Cantor’s “In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made” (2001) is an ambitious but deeply problematic attempt to recast the Black Death as a transformative force in Western history, blending conventional scholarship with speculative leaps that often lack sufficient evidence.

This isn’t the kind of book I expected from someone with Cantor’s academic credentials—a former Rhodes Scholar with a Princeton PhD under the eminent medievalist Joseph R. Strayer, and a teaching career that included Columbia and other top institutions. While Cantor’s narrative is engaging and filled with vivid anecdotes, he frequently departs from established historiography, advancing controversial claims – such as the idea that the plague originated from space dust or that it disproportionately wiped out the social elite, thereby ushering in modernity – without sufficient documentation or support from scholarly consensus. His tendency to overstate cultural and economic causality, often based on thin or tangential evidence, risks misleading readers unfamiliar with the more cautious conclusions of mainstream medieval studies. Ultimately, the book reads more like an imaginative exercise in historical “what-ifs” than a reliable account, and its themes and conclusions should be approached with caution.

Between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death – known at the time simply as “the pestilence” – killed an estimated twenty million people across Europe. In many regions, nearly forty percent of the population perished. Europe was utterly unprepared for the scale and speed of the catastrophe. As Cantor writes, the immediate, desperate responses were to “pray very hard, quarantine the sick, run away, or find a scapegoat to blame for the terror.”

Nowhere was harder hit than England, which is the central focus of In the Wake of the Plague. The combined English and Welsh population, estimated at around six million in 1300, did not return to that level until the mid-eighteenth century. One of Cantor’s most striking—and controversial—arguments is that the Black Death may not have been caused solely by Yersinia pestis, the bacterium traditionally blamed for bubonic plague. For England in particular, he entertains the possibility that the pandemic was a combination of plague and anthrax—a cattle-borne disease whose early symptoms can closely resemble those of plague.

Cantor points out that in many cases, the disease spread too rapidly to be explained by known plague vectors like fleas and rats, and outbreaks often occurred in midwinter, when rats were unlikely to be active. He also notes that many victims died without the high fever or blackened buboes typically associated with bubonic plague, which had an estimated fatality rate of 80% within two weeks. At the same time, genetic studies of remains from mass graves in London have confirmed the presence of Y. pestis, complicating the picture.

Cantor also floats a more speculative claim: that individuals descended from survivors of the Black Death may carry a genetic mutation that provides complete immunity to HIV/AIDS. For better or worse, the book is sprinkled with provocative theories like this—little narrative “Easter eggs” that challenge conventional thinking, even if they’re not always supported by firm evidence.

Wealth in the late Middle Ages was highly concentrated. Cantor estimates that by the time the Black Death reached Europe, about sixty percent of all Western European wealth was held by just 300 families – roughly fifty of them English. He claims each of these families enjoyed an annual income equivalent to at least one billion dollars in today’s purchasing power, though he offers no explanation for how he arrives at such an extraordinary figure – a recurring issue throughout the book.

The centuries leading up to the plague were marked by a period of climatic warming and steady rainfall, which fueled population growth and soaring land values. In England, approximately forty percent of land was owned by royalty—either the king and his immediate family or nobles bearing titles such as baron, earl, or duke. Nearly sixty percent was divided between the gentry (the upper-middle class of knights and esquires) and the Church. Cantor compares the vast ecclesiastical estates managed by monks to modern multi-billion-dollar corporations, with abbots functioning as tough-minded CEOs. Less than two percent of English land was held by free peasants, known as yeomen.

In medieval England, land was by far the most valuable asset, and marriage alliances were the primary means of accumulating wealth through real estate. Property claims shifted constantly through marriage, birth, death, and inheritance. Cantor writes that “the Black Death fell [over this process of real estate gain and loss] like a tornado sweeping across the countryside.” Estates that had taken generations to assemble were suddenly absorbed by other families in the chaos. Nothing did more to advance the legal profession and the development of real estate common law than this period of upheaval. As Cantor puts it, “The plague had shaken the gentry society like an earthquake, and the fissures ran deep and long.”

According to Cantor, the plague dramatically hastened the decline of the medieval aristocracy. The massive death toll created severe labor shortages, which in turn gave peasants and workers newfound bargaining power. In his words, the disease “shook the wealthy … to its foundations. It was as if a neutron bomb had been detonated.” This upheaval in social and economic structures weakened the traditional power of the aristocracy and helped pave the way for early capitalism, the rise of centralized monarchies, and the emergence of the modern state.

The most significant social and economic consequences of the plague took a full generation to unfold. A severe labor shortage gripped the British Isles, which, according to Cantor, intensified class polarization within an emerging capitalist economy. Surviving peasants began demanding higher wages and better working conditions, but the ruling class pushed back with restrictive measures like the Statute of Labourers (1351), which attempted to freeze wages and limit worker mobility. By 1380, a flat-rate poll tax was imposed on all adults, regardless of income – an unpopular burden that became the immediate catalyst for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in eastern England. Cantor calls it “the greatest proletarian rising before the eighteenth century.”

The Black Death also disrupted foreign policy for the Plantagenet dynasty, which Cantor provocatively describes as “a genetic order of fighting royal monsters.” He devotes significant attention to the reign of King Edward III, arguing that the plague deepened dynastic and political instability in England. Cantor speculates on the premature death of Edward’s heir, the Black Prince, and how disease may have influenced the royal succession and contributed to the eventual outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.

One striking example is the death of Princess Joan, Edward’s beautiful and wealthy fifteen-year-old daughter – his favorite, according to Cantor – who died of plague in 1348 in Bordeaux en route to marry Pedro of Castile. In one of his many inexplicable turns of phrase, Cantor refers to her as a “top-drawer white girl.” Her marriage would have secured a crucial alliance for Edward in the Hundred Years’ War against France – an opportunity he never regained after her death.

Worse still, Cantor argues, the plague eroded royal authority itself. “The biomedical catastrophe took away charisma from kings,” he writes, “eroded popular support for their veneration and self-esteem as God’s anointed and as war leaders and money providers.”

Cantor also argues that the mid-fourteenth-century plague exposed Thomism – the belief system of Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas, which sought to reconcile Catholic faith with Aristotelian logic and reason – as an intellectual dead end. Rooted in observation and rational analysis, Thomism, according to Cantor, led inexorably to “liberal dogmas, happy dispositions, and intellectual nullity.” In the aftermath of the plague, this framework lost credibility, giving way to a more detail-oriented and quantitative approach to knowledge, one that largely abandoned efforts to synthesize science and theology.

Cantor contends that the trauma of the Black Death shattered religious certainty and created space for more secular, skeptical, and individualistic modes of thought – developments that would eventually feed into the Renaissance and the rise of humanism. He links this shift to changes in art, literature, and the values of the elite. While the connection between plague trauma and cultural transformation is compelling, it remains difficult to prove.

The plague also fueled a surge in anti-Semitism and the rise of authoritarian religious movements. Cantor examines how the Black Death intensified scapegoating, particularly against Jewish communities, and argues that the epidemic helped give rise to repressive religious responses—including flagellant cults and inquisitorial fervor. He provocatively draws a parallel between medieval anti-Semitic violence and later genocides, suggesting that widespread biological panic can serve as a catalyst for authoritarian politics.

Pope Clement VI (r. 1342–1352) is portrayed as a relatively sympathetic figure. He collected Hebrew manuscripts, believed that Jewish and Christian learning formed part of a shared intellectual tradition, and made efforts to protect Jewish communities from mob violence during the height of the plague.

Finally, Cantor extends his argument by suggesting that the fall of the Roman Empire was ultimately driven by biomedical catastrophes. Between 250 and 650 AD, a series of pandemics – smallpox and gonorrhea from 250 to 450, followed by bubonic plague from 540 to 650 – may have reduced the population by as much as one-quarter. This dramatic decline strained food supplies, shrank the tax base, deepened class divisions, and contributed to the political collapse of the Roman elite, paving the way for the rise of illiterate populist rule and barbarian invasions.

Cantor draws a parallel to the fate of the Plantagenet dynasty in England. Without the devastating losses inflicted by the Black Death that crippled the population base required to field large infantry armies, he argues the Plantagenets might well have succeeded in their ambition to become kings of France. “Both [Rome and the Plantagenets],” Cantor writes, “were grand edifices undone by the specter of infectious disease and pandemics.”

In closing, Cantor portrays the Black Death as a biological revolution – one that profoundly reshaped both elite and popular mentalities. He argues that the plague destabilized feudalism, empowered the peasantry, weakened the aristocracy, and accelerated the rise of capitalism, centralized monarchies, and Renaissance humanism. He also underscores how labor shortages, wage inflation, and increased peasant mobility triggered long-term transformations in land tenure and social hierarchy.

While Cantor’s core arguments broadly align with mainstream scholarly views, he pushes them much further – emphasizing the immediacy and dramatic scale of the plague’s impact, where others might see more gradual, regionally uneven change. Though not entirely original, his interpretation adds a vivid cultural dimension to conventional historical analysis, casting the Black Death as a seismic rupture that shattered the medieval world’s foundations.