Will
posts on 7/13/2005 3:20:29 PM
I have to say that I regretted wasting my time reading this book. While Cantor does raise some interesting points regarding the possibility of the Plague being Anthrax as well as Bubonic Plague, his evidence for this seems inconclusive at best, and seems to be based entirely around an isolated discovery of a few anthrax spores in a mass grave for plague victims, as well as the ridiculous notion that the Bubonic plague alone could not have travelled as fast as it did because rats would not have travelled that far. Not only is this ridiculous from both a medical and practical standpoint, it is a typical example of Cantor's tendancy to make broad generalizations based on evidence that is limited in its scope and relevance. In fact, many of Cantor's "facts" are not only inaccurate or limited in accuracy, but are outright false (take for example his statement that the crossbows used by the mercenaries employed by the French had a range of 30 yards and a reload time of 30 minutes). He also has a tendancy to allow personal bias to creep into his historical analysis, a definate flaw for an historian (he at one point refers to Edward III as a "Horrible Old Man" and denounces the Royal Family for their poor taste, and even goes so far as to say that "14th Century People lacked a critical Value System"- Modernocentric in the extreme, to say nothing of being wrong (just read clerical texts from the century if you don't believe me).) As if this were not enough, the book itself is very poorly written- Cantor rambles excessively on tangents that have very little to do with the topic at hand, and many of which don't even deal with the middle ages. Cantor does occasionally get things right, and if you want to read it, go ahead, but you would be a lot better off reading other works on the time period, such as "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman, to cite one example. If you do decide to read it, be careful not to simply accept what Cantor says as definative fact!
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