Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2021, paperback edition 2024, xxxii, 1026 pp., 23 maps, 7 figures, 64 tables.

The original edition of this massive historical study appeared in 2003, a new edition followed in 2021, and now we have available a paperback edition. This highly ambitious project has never been reviewed in Mediaevistik, so now, with the new paperback, the time has come although a single reviewer can barely do justice to it. We all know that the Black Death was a monumental historical event in the middle of the fourteenth century, which continued in waves throughout the next hundred and more years. It affected all of Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East, and also the Far East. Latest research by the scholars who contributed to a volume edited by Monica Green, Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World (2014; here only mentioned in passing), claims that the origin of the Plague can be traced even further east to Mongolia, that is, north of the Himalaya, but here we face really difficult questions regarding the validity of data and the value of transdisciplinary research.