A medieval scholar schools the New Yorker about the Black Death in stern open letter
Aux Features medieval times
If you aren’t clued into #MedievalTwitter, you really are being quite the knave—it’s arguably the best, often sassiest way outside of a grad student TA’s breakout session to learn all about world history circa 1200 CE. Unfortunately, a lot of people out there remain unaware of #MedievalTwitter’s existence, including, it seems, The New Yorker, who learned firsthand this week just how savage takedowns can be from nerds well-versed on Saxon poetry, Islamic-Papal relations in 1032, and other such obscurities.
Yesterday, Elly R. Truitt of the University of Pennsylvania tweeted out an open letter to the magazine in response to a recent article regarding the Black Death. The piece, which ran in this week’s print edition and is available online here, contends that the bubonic plague actually helped to end the Middle Ages and establish a cultural renewal throughout Europe, which, according to Professor Truitt, is total horseshit.
“There was no ‘intellectual overthrow of the scholastic-medicine establishment’ as a result of the plague,” wrote Truitt. “In fact, the elastic therapeutic framework offered by Galenic theory, which underpinned all text-based, learned medicine across Islamdom, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin Christian West, offered a highly rationalized framework for understanding the etiology, transmission, and treatment of the plague through the seventeenth century at least.”
Oh snap, New Yorker! How’s it feel to get burned almost as badly as Europe’s pyres during the Dark Ages? Anyway, Truitt goes on to destroy the article piece-by-piece, noting that the essay apparently reinforces some pretty outdated, long-disproven Anglocentric myths about the spread of disease and medicinal research during that era.
“[The author] continued to spread a demonstrably false, xenophobic narrative about how the Black Death reached European shores,” Truitt writes near the end of their letter. “It’s clear that some things have not changed between the fourteenth-century and the twenty-first.”
You tell ‘em, teach!
Update, 7:09 p.m.: A New Yorker spokesperson has now responded to Truitt’s letter, stating that, “Elly Truitt’s critique of our recent story “Crossroads” is off-base and, unfortunately, ignores the facts that were carefully laid out in the piece. We stand by the story.”
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132 Comments
I post this in jest, of course, this letter is really cool
grant8418, I’ve never had to expel anyone from a comment thread before, but… well, that pig had some powerful friends.
Hey, did you get a load of the nerd?
You pick just about any topic and the people who actually know about it are often horrified by what passes as ‘information’ on the subject in the American popular media. This applies to the media covering military affairs, history, paleontology, medicine, economics, foreign news, and any other topic you can think of.
Don’t forget music. As a musician and long-time employee of a musical instrument store, nearly ANY depiction of someone ‘playing’ an instrument in any media is cringeworthy.
What about Whiplash? That’s pretty good, right?Also, since you work at a musical instrument store . . . I’ve been learning drums for six months and am making progress. I originally bought a $500 electric kit, but now that I know I’m enjoying it and plan to stick with it, I’d like to soundproof part of my basement and upgrade to an acoustic kit. Maybe something around a thousand bucks. Two questions, if you’re bored at work and have the time to answer:1) What kit do you recommend for a relative beginner who plays mostly rock? Or, perhaps a resource to help me make that decision.2) When I walk into a store like yours to try different kits, what can I play so that I don’t look like a total, newbie clown? I’m kind of intimidated by the prospect of that.Thanks!
Just grab a set of reasonably-priced shells off craigslist—you can often find “I thought I wanted to be a drummer but I don’t want to put in the time” gently-used 6-8 piece sets for $400 or less—and stick with the name-brand stuff like Tama and DW. Replace the heads (I like Evans G2 Coated but you’ll have your own preferences), learn how to tune them, get yourself a set of intro cymbals (Zildjian’s ZBT set are relatively well priced as are Sabian’s B8 Pros; check their sound at the store before you decide) and be prepared to spend a lot more on hardware than you expected.At the level you are now, and that I was not very long ago, you’ll be better served getting a set of serviceable and affordable equipment to experiment with so you can figure out what kind of sound you like. Once you put in some time on the acoustics, and have done a bunch of tuning up and down to get the various sounds out of them, you’ll have the ear and experience to target your next set a lot more accurately.
Thanks. Good advice all around. Except for the Tama part. I’m sure they’re good drums, but I so strongly associate them with shitty drummer/mega-douche Lars Ulrich that it’s ruined the brand for me!Thanks again.
And then TV shows like “Mozart in the Jungle” or “Empire” come along and you realize the world at large will never really understand the music industry
I’m not trying to be a wise guy- I really don’t know what you mean. Members of the media can’t tell when someone is playing an instrument??
I mean that, all too often, the depiction of someone playing an instrument on TV or on film is incorrect.
Oh- I see. Yes, it makes me crazy, too. You should see Cary Grant “playing piano” in a movie as Cole Porter. He wiggles his fingers!
That’s because they know practically nobody is going to notice, and those who notice aren’t going to care. They don’t even bother to get it right in music videos half the time, look at how they edit drumming.On the other hand, something like Whiplash is a whole different situation, where the technical aspects are more or less right but the whole story is supposedly about jazz but put together by someone who doesn’t know anything about jazz, but hates it anyway (because as a child he was bitten by a jazz that had gotten loose from its pen).
YES! I am a cellist, and when actors are bowing up on the finger board; or are “playing vibrato” without moving their hand; or are playing notes and not on the right string, etc., I just die a little inside.
I grew up in a family full of bowlers (though I haven’t touched a ball in 30 years.) It makes me crazy when characters in a movie are supposed to go bowling every weekend, and the actors have no idea how to properly throw a ball. None. I just saw Richard Pryor doing it in a movie called “Blue Collar.” He looked like a nine year-old when he threw it. Then Harvey Keitel is supposed to be better than Pryor. His form is almost proper, but his foot slides about five inches past the foul line, and nobody says anything about it. It certainly should be easier to teach a person who to believably throw a bowling ball than it is to teach them to believably finger a cello!!
My younger brother is a recording engineer/producer. He says that in his 30 odd years in the business nobody has ever used the expression ‘lay down a track’. That drives him nuts on tv shows etc.I’m an experimental psychologist. The shit tv shows and movies get wrong about the brain, well, I’m not going to start……
But maybe that’s cause they are using more than 10% of their brain…Checkmate science!
Or maybe they are right brained, or left brained, or visual learners, or kinaesthetic learners or they have repressed memories or… FUCK
I finally watched The Umbrella Academy a few months ago, and would it have hurt the producers to give Ellen Page just -one- lesson on the violin? Nothing annoys me more than seeing close-ups on people playing string instruments and they clearly have no idea how it works.
Or serial killing. You watch TV shows about serial killers and see some of the stuff they think is realistic, but as someone who’s killed and dismembered several people … uh … I mean …What were we talking about?
My sticking point is this: Why don’t more subject experts go into journalism if they want to improve the accuracy of reporting on their discipline? So many people who criticize that kind of coverage relegate their own contributions to scholarly journals that lock the information behind paywalls instead of telling stories that would give them a wider audience than simply other experts and/or students. Not to assign good intentions to nearly every journalist, but there are many who do what they do because they want to tell stories for the benefit of readers, whereas many of these scholars do what they do to benefit “the discipline.”Basically, academics who aren’t also storytellers are abrogating their social responsibility. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.P.S. To pre-empt a potential rebuttal: No, asking people to pay for a subscription to a paper is not the same as asking people to pay for access to a scholarly journal. It’s all about where the money goes and who the information reaches.
Because journalism is its own discipline that requires years of practice and study to get good at. People who can master multiple disciplines are rare, and by the time you’ve mastered one you may well be too old (for all practical purposes) to start a new one.
As a journalist, I think this take is absolute bullshit. You don’t need a degree or years of practice to do something that’s so inherent to the human skillset. Some of the best reporting I’ve ever seen has come from the field’s greenest recruits. In fact, this is exactly the mindset that keeps so many people away. Please stop perpetuating it.Think about what journalism actually is. It’s telling a factual story about something happening in the world. Are there techniques that help? Absolutely. Are they required? Absolutely not.And actually, let’s unpack this more. Are you saying we can’t keep learning over the course of our lives? That we are only capable of picking up a single discipline, gaining some level of expertise in it, and then dying? You’re speaking from the crumbling tower of 20th-century trade schooling; the mindset that says things work they way they do because they should.
This isn’t a bad idea, but there are some logical concerns that I think you’ve overlooked.So your argument is that since regular journalists aren’t able to report accurately on complex subjects like science, scientists should become journalists. And you think this is a good idea, because journalism isn’t that hard. But if it’s not that hard, then why aren’t journalists already accurately reporting on complex subjects?What sort of journalists do you expect scientists to be? Someone who contributes to a newspaper once a week? Once a month? How would a leading scientist have the time to have a second job, and still be a leading scientist? I think at the same time you’re over-representing how easy it is to be a journalist, you’re also under-representing how hard it is to be a scientist.
You’re making an important distinction that I completely agree with, and frankly should have included. I don’t think scientists should become journalists; I think academics in disciplines with an emphasis on the written word should. Which I think is very relevant to the subject of the article.
Hm. You probably ought to go back and re-read my comment, and see if you can figure out why you decided to read into it a bunch of stuff that pretty clearly isn’t there.
What a wonderful way to not respond to anything I said.I’d write it in full again, but here are some more specifically-written points that directly address your phrasing just to make sure we’re not having any misunderstandings:-You don’t need years of practice and study to be a good journalist-Even if you did, plenty of people master multiple disciplines, and everyone is fully capable of doing soEverything else I wrote was a perfectly reasonable extension of those points.
Sire.Share with me the bylines of a few Good Journalists, who have not had years of either practice or study. Seriously. Let’s really evaluate their work.Engineer, with BSc. , MASc., and now MPP in Public Policy: I don’t think you quite understand how rare it would be to find right/left brain professionals, who are not focused on their game, to go write as their trade.But. Hey. Do you.
Have you seen what drafts of academic papers look like? Most academics can’t write worth shit, and they’re already highly educated. It’s true that some green journalists know how to write coherently, but that’s already selecting from the subset of people interested in journalism.
C’mon
Eileen
Oh I swear
Well, now I feel dirty.
How is that different from usual?
LOL such hyperbole. No, one can become an economist and easily become a journalist thereafter. The REAL problem is it doesn’t pay so we let the lay people spread their ignorant shit.
Media is often internally politicized and selective; skill is often not required but the right ideas and allegiance are. It’s just too much work for little gain; whereas you can freely express yourself on social media.
I’d also say that it takes a long time to understand even the basics of a subject, and journalism is about quick turnaround. Sometimes even for “the best” journalists, they simply can’t grasp complex subjects and regenerate them quickly in an accessible format. Moreover, journalists are biased AF just like everyone else, and just like this prof called out.
Journalism isn’t always about quick turnaround; articles in the New Yorker, for example, are frequently researched and written over the course of weeks or months. It’s “news” that requires quick turnaround, but of course articles about things that have just happened, even those written by careful, seasoned pros, are usually full of errors, because it takes time to sort out the truth and there’s just no time when you have to have something written in the next couple of hours.
True, but wouldn’t you say that weeks or months is relatively quick versus someone who spends 4 years getting a PhD in the subject, or someone who spends a lifetime in the discipline, like this professor? And I’m not slagging journalism, btw. It serves a critical function. I also taught at a film and journalism school so I know a great number of journalists who feel passionate about the work and genuinely do the best they can to disseminate information to the public. (Though one wonders if, with this journalist being so woefully of the mark and so woefully full of Western biases.)
Er, the “weeks or months” I was talking to was about referred to the research and writing of a particular article (and New Yorker feature writers are usually working on several articles at once), not about the time it takes to learn how to be a journalist.
Which is interesting in itself, as journalism used to be regarded as a kind of grubby, seedy, blue collar job, and one that was learned on the job through apprenticeship. Training in the academy as a baseline requirement for entry into the profession is a fairly recent thing in journalism. It would be interesting if that older model could be revived in cases like this, i.e. you get your advance subject area training in whatever topic piques your interest and then go to work for a paper and get assigned to the less glamorous beats (local court proceedings, etc.) to learn the mechanics of reporting and then move on to covering your subject area.
That might expands the ranks of journalists, but I’m not sure if it would help with what I see as the most important problem in the field, which is that the good kind of journalism (investigative, holding those in power to account, seeking to give people an accurate view of the world) inherently doesn’t pay nearly as well as sensational or partisan journalism.
I’m a physician. As much as I would like to write for the general public, there are two big barriers:1) My day job keeps me too busy and pays much better than I could ever hope to get reimbursed for writing general-purpose medical articles.2) As someone noted already, writing is a skill that takes time and effort to hone. I have neither the skill, nor the time to formally train.So, I’ll have to remain satisfied with occasionally responding to comments on various websites.
To be clear, I’m not exactly asking physicians to get out there and become journalists. This is much more geared toward scholars. Given the subject of the article, that was where my head was at, and what I assumed we were talking about.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Fuck yeah they work to benefit “the discipline.” Which is not an abstract, non-material thing as the quotation marks would imply, but an ongoing dialogue between professionals that deepens knowledge of a given subject over time. Every field has its communicators to broader audiences, but you wouldn’t want every academic to be a broad communicator, believe me. There’s always going to be some disparity between the nitty gritty of a given field and popular knowledge of it. That doesn’t necessarily represent an abrogation of responsibility. It just means the story has to be written before it’s told.
The problem is that the communicators aren’t professionals, largely because our expectations of what it means to be a communicator are skewed toward a lack of substance. More professionals in those roles would change that.And it’s worth noting that many scholarly disciplines’ best-remembered and most change-making names were themselves storytellers.
I think “the communicators aren’t professionals” is too broad. Anthony Fauci is a professional. Aaron Copeland was a professional. Joseph Campbell was a professional. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking were professionals, though their actual academic work was a lot less glamorous than their personas/sci-fi novels/inspiring biographies. David McCollough iiiis…probably a better argument for your point than mine. Noam Chomsky vice versa. Maybe I’m wrong here, I but I think most popular communicators hail, at least to some degree, from the field for which they speak. I just think some people are better poster children than others, more natural performers, more talented at consolidating complex information, and some people are better off sticking to bookworm status. One problem you can discern is that once an academic becomes a popular figure, they often get less good at the thing for which they used to be famous.
Not only that, but all the experienced journalists keep getting fired because they cost too much. The media outlets are owned by people that want more more more more money. They want more clicks, more ad revenue, more more more. The “industry” of journalism has fundamentally changed. It’s better to be first than correct in today’s journalism world.
Starred for “abrogation.”(And for being a good comment, but mostly “abrogation”)
There’s such amusing irony in this.Your ted talk wonders why scientists don’t go the distance while clearly never going the distance to talk to those scientists. Stellar!I think you enjoy having a sticking point more than you want the answer to your questions… thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I am so, so confused why people are making this about scientists instead of scholars.
My bad… did you ask or investigate the scholars?
Because a paper can’t hire an expert on every single subject under the sun and many experts aren’t great at telling stories or putting things in layman’s terms. For that reason there’s a job, well used to be where you’d go talk to experts and report the factual findings. These people were trained to be as unbiased as they could and to report facts devoid of opinion. They were better at communicating complex ideas to the masses than the experts who were used to talking to other experts. It’s a really efficient system and if we still had people doing that 2nd job it may have worked. Either way now we have spray tans shouting opinions but it doesn’t change the fact that no one wants to listen to an expert because they’re almost never experts in communicating.
Storytelling and communication are worlds apart. Every academic has to be a good storyteller in order to write anything of value; it’s just that the telling is too often wrapped up in jargon and a price tag.
Yah charging for information if a great way to foster ignorance.
How many times before 2020 would an expert on the black death been writing popular articles. It’s usually rare for narrow specialties to be interesting to the general public.
It’s not like her entire base of knowledge is about the Black Death. She’s a medieval scholar. A historian. Writing for audiences is what they do, and public and private contexts are hardly mutually exclusive.
A scholar specializing in a field does not generally have the time or means to educate YOU about their specialized field. Scholars publish their work which can be accessed by the public, but YOU have to be the one to look for it / want to read it. They don’t have media outlets (i.e. a newspaper etc) to publish their work for them.. for a GREAT many reasons. The most relevant being no publisher is going to typically publish the works of legal scholars because they don’t sell ads / clicks. People want to read about scandals, entertainment, politics… less than 1% of the public, sadly, cares about other important fields that are covered by scholars. What publication is going to commit suicide by publishing articles from scholars when only a few thousand people will actually read it, when they can get millions of people to read their nonsense about an actor, athlete, musician etc.
An interesting thing is actually happening within the academy right now— there is a push to do more public outreach, although there is quite a bit of unease about (1) how to do it well and (2) who is going to pay for it.
It’s also not work that is institutionally rewarded. If university hiring and tenure committees cared *at all* about public outreach and communication, there might be more of it. As is, it is the sort of thing that often becomes either a pet project or a post-tenure plan. (As an early career medievalist myself, I would love to focus on public outreach as I absolutely live to teach, but there is no incentive for me to do so. To the contrary— there are strong disincentives.)
Scholarly articles actually locked behind paywalls is becoming a rarity with the the proliferation of open access journals, sites like Arxiv, Researchgate, and Academia. It’s actually become unusual that I can’t find a .pdf of an article that I want these days. One big reason that you’re omitting for why subject experts don’t go into journalism is that there are not actually all that many journalist jobs out there for them to go into. Practically, most (read: virtually all) experts are betters served by devoting their time to their actual work and then having a blog/twitter presence on the side (like the expert in question here).
Going to TL;DR this: Most people who write papers don’t actually have a choice about where their paper goes or what kind of paywall it gets put behind. A paper will be submitted for peer review in a journal that, presumably, has some authority and integrity. Once the paper gets submitted, it’s more or less owned by that journal. The people who write the papers don’t actually see any money from that paywall. The “payment” is that they receive the hat-tip favor of being published author who has a paper in a (hopefully) respected journal, which is generally a requisite for getting tenure in some employment.
Your take on the focus of academics is probably accurate. And when you peek behind the curtain at the kind of work they’re doing for the benefit of the discipline, you’ll see that a lot of it is pretty nonsensical, or at that very least pointless. For example, I worked clerical for a time in the English department of a major university and spent a lot of time looking at faculty CVs, all of which were about a mile long. But many of the essays listed, published in journals that had a circulation of about 200 (probably all college faculty), would be shit like, “Reading the Plays of William Shakespeare through the Films of David Cronenberg” or whatever. Writing like this could be clever, witty, etc. They may reflect the kinds of conversations academics have with one another over cocktails. But they also kind of feel like a kid banging two rocks together to see what new shapes will emerge. Add in the thick jargon, and you’ve got a recipe for obscurity. Academics could write for the masses. But they’re trained from the moment they step into grad school to write for their colleagues. You could also argue that getting info across in plain language, and in 800 – 2000 words no less, is a greater challenge than a writing a three hundred page, jargon-laden monograph intended for an audience already well-versed in the subject at hand.
The skills of writing a scholarly article and the skills of writing a journalistic article for the populace at large are significantly different. Being able to manage one doesn’t mean you can manage the other.
Which is why we can’t leave science solely in the hands of the nerds. Somebody needs to go and explain it to everybody else and they need to be be able to handle large crowds, short syllables, and not being right all the time.
So much this. Roger Ebert once discussed a Motown documentary he had loved with a musician who had grown up in Detroit. The musician explained all the things they got wrong, to which Ebert said “that’s why you can’t watch a documentary when you know the subject.”I remember decades ago watching a financial show and some pharma company’s price had dipped. The guy being interviewed claimed it was due to some interim results from a trial of an oncology drug. As one of the people accruing to that trial and receiving updates about it, I knew his explanation was total bullshit. At that point I realized he probably wasn’t the only exec bullshitting on the financial shows and I stopped watching them.
I have a degree in biology and am horrified every day by what people think they know about Covid.
Typically agree, except The New Yorker has what is considered probably the most stringent and realible fact-checking depratment in pretty much all media.The fact that they still stand by the story tells me there’s more to it than meets the eye here.
“When fact becomes legend, print the legend.”
The Pennsylvania scholar went on to conclude their rebuttal with an anecdote concerning the girth of “Yo female forebearer”.
Yeah, journalists often write crap. On the other hand I’m not that impressed by the historian’s defense of Galenic theory as “highly rationalized” and able to explain an epidemic. That makes me angry (maybe I’m choleric). The only thing that could do that in a rational way was the germ theory of disease, and Galen’s superstitions in no way helped.
Um, it’s complicated. Read the article.You didn’t, did you?You just popped off.
I read the letter by the historian. That’s the relevant part in this discussion. I don’t really care what Lawrence Wright (a journalist and screenwriter with absolutely no background in medieval history) has to say about the subject other than disappointment that the New Yorker would give him space on this subject.
The article is about a medieval historian meditating on the resemblance (or not) of our current situation and the plague of the 14th century. You seem under the impression that the article is Lawrence Wright bloviating rather than being, for the most part, Lawrence Wright recounting in great detail what an actual PhD tells him. He exhaustively describes the multiple interviews the two have, recounting her points in long quotations, and the aggravation the letter expresses are over the views of this other historian. You are under this misapprehension because you didn’t read the article.
That makes me angry (maybe I’m choleric)
Your humors might have become unbalanced.
A good bleeding with leeches will cast the devil out of ye.
Usually one has to pay extra to be taken down like that so thoroughly and completely. I shall forthwith be in my bunk.
The more I read about history, the more convinced I become that the reputation of the Renaissance is overblown, with the exception of art.
There are always going to be substantial simplifications or mischaracterizations involved in trying to view centuries-long periods as coherent “eras” juxtaposed against each other as well as progressing into each other, but I do think there are merits to the Renaissance as the transition into Modernity (in the broad sense, and one which may require renaming because we may be leaving it or maybe indeed in the judgment of the future will have already left it). (Plus the art.)But if there is one thing we have inherited directly from the Renaissance, it’s definitely taking ahistorical views of the past as a means to pat ourselves on the back for our superiority.
It feels like the problem (a problem, anyway) is that someone says “I’m going to categorize this range of time using term X” and then other people say “I’m going to assume that because this range is labeled ‘X’ everything in it is homogeneous.” And then people end up arguing over terminology.
Even the reputation of the art is overblown! (Or rather, the demarkation between “pre-modern” and “modern” is vastly overstated.) The most frequently used time period for the Middle Ages is 500-1500, roughly. Take a look at those wonderful stars of the so-called “Northern Renaissance,” van Eyck, van der Weyden, and Riemenschneider. You’ll see that they are both incredible artists and doing work well before that arbitrary cut off. 🙂
It’s important, but the difference between it and the High and Late Middle Ages before it is vastly overblown.
Art and marketing, obviously, because we’re still taking their word for it on how awesome they were 600 years later.
If you aren’t clued into #MedievalTwitter, you really are being quite the knave—it’s arguably the best, often sassiest way outside of a grad student TA’s breakout session to learn all about world history circa 1200 CE. I’m so glad that people like this exist, and I’m sorry that current society makes this kind of scholarship a very hard way to make a decent living.
“Oh snap, New Yorker! How’s it feel to get burned almost as badly as Europe’s pyres during the Dark Ages?”
Well, I’ve read more than a few articles by historians written specifically to challenge the rather dated notion that the Middle Ages were in fact not the Dark Ages but a time of great intellectual, scientific, social and artistic growth and in fact should be considered the real Renaissance Age so, yeah. I’m frankly shocked The New Yorker would run something so stupid but it has slipped a lot the past decade and this is just another example.
The Renaissance, in my opinion, probably slowed the advance of the sciences rather than advanced it. On one hand, the use of the printing press allowed for more widespread dissemination of knowledge. But on the other hand, the progress that had advanced towards the development of the modern scientific method during the late medieval period had to fight against the new deification of Aristotle and other ancient writers. Aristotle was a great mind and his contributions to logical reasoning were invaluable, but his actual science writing was garbage. There was a long academic struggle during the Renaissance that pitted the empiricists against those who viewed ancient science writers as dogmatic. The empiricists eventually won, but overall progress in the sciences was slower than it should have been.
I have weirdly mixed feelings about this. It reads a lot like an academic turf war of sorts. Like, too bad Lawrence Wright picked a scholar to interview who’s so old and out of touch, or who isn’t on the same page as this other scholar. So much of academia involves really smart people picking the living daylights out of each other’s arguments and the quality of their research and whether they’ve been derelict in keeping up with the latest journal articles, or trying to be contrarian for the sake of attention, etc. etc. etc. Academia and scholarship are almost continually shifting. Taking this “GASP have you not even read the May 2015 edition of the Journal of Medieval Worlds and its series on historical rodent populations?” attitude might feel satisfying at the time but I have a suspicion it doesn’t meaningfully advance the public’s understanding of things. In another 15 years somebody else might read that letter and laugh at how confident the author is in statements that have since been debunked (or whatever.)
Okay, but, seriously, if you’re trotted out as an expert and your shit is out of date ya think maybe someone who knows more than you a) should have been the person the journalist consulted and b) is technically right and, therefore, should be the one correcting your out of date shit for posterity’s sake? When you don’t do that, you end up with schools in North Carolina calling the Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression” and Flat Earth Theory being a thing…
I just see this whole thing in the context of many similar arguments in academia that often have the same tone and contours. I’m not saying anybody is right or wrong per se. Academia is a constant game of “Well really, I know more than that person.” If the journalist had consulted the other academic, instead of the one he did consult, a third person could have come and written a similar “take down.” What I’m getting at is, it is not helpful to conceive of all these things as “take downs.” This is literally how scholarship works. If that third person wants to nose in and point out what’s wrong with the letter that was written in response to the first person’s quotes in an article written by a journalist who isn’t an expert to begin with, that is all for the good.The generation of 20-30 year old academics always thinks of the 70-80 year old academics’ work as “out of date shit.” Lawrence Wright called this Gianna Pomata person because (I assume) she is an eminence grise and he wanted her take on the whole idea of a pandemic. He is not actually writing about the latest advances in medieval studies. I guess anybody in the field is welcome to say “he should have called me!” (or XYZ person) instead.
Oh, the pissing contests in the Philosophical realm of academia are some of the most obnoxious displays of obtuse philology dispensed on the masses, so, trust me, I feel ya. However, I think it’s somewhat problematic of us to level criticism on the “well, actually…” crowd when the information they’re providing (regardless of the snark inherent in the delivery) is the most current and relevant data or, in this case, is data that is not driving misconceptions and harboring xenophobic biases that have been disproved.
Sure, this should have been handled a little more delicately but, like, we’re not in that circle and it’s very possible Ms. Tuitt is as sick and tired of hearing this dip’s out-dated research touted as “expert” as I am of hearing Chomsky talk about foreign policy. If she’s at that level of hate? Shit, I’m surprised she didn’t add shit emojis and Tony Stark eyeroll gifs.
Cuz I’ll knock Chomsky the fuck out he ever show his face around my campus again. Believe that. Yeah, I know he’s old as hell. His jaw still works, don’t it? Yup, I’d like to change that.Fuck Chomsky.
Dr. Tuitt, actually. But, yeah, you are correct. The world of Medieval academics has been really going through a lot of soul-searching about xenophobia and racism in the field. Given Dr. Tuitt’s specialty, it’s not surprised that she’s particularly sensitive to the narrative at hand. And hey, a journalist is only as good as their sources and they should be careful to choose with more care, right?
LOL okay, you seem to have some deep seated violent anger at a very old man because you don’t like his ideas, but I can’t really help there
I appreciate your anti Chomsky screed and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I think you nailed it. I like to think of it this way: Imagine if, back when Wright started on this article, he had called Truitt instead of Pomata. Then the article comes out, and Pomata writes an angry letter detailing everything she thought was wrong. Then the A.V. Club writes a snarky article about how “Medieval scholar schools the New Yorker on the Black Death.”The A.V. Club writer (Andrew Paul) and way too many of the Commentariat are operating from a place where one of the scholars is “right” about medieval history and the other is “wrong,” as if the lives of billions of individuals over centuries can be boiled down so easily. None of us here are experts on medieval history; for all we know, both Truitt and Pomata are totally out of touch with what most current medieval historians think. Or maybe Truitt is. Or maybe Pomata is. For various folks to merely assume that because one person writes a letter “correcting” another, that the writer is automatically right, is idiotic in the extreme.
Hello! I am *actually* a medievalist (I specialize in late Medieval Germany— fifteenth century Niedersachsen, to be specific) and yes, there are absolutely “wrong” takes on the period. We more documentation for later periods over earlier periods, but there is quite a lot of both textual and material evidence we have to go on. If you’ve got the time, the languages, and the paleography skills, (as well as access to the archeological/material culture evidence!), you can assemble a pretty good sense of what happened and what did not.
Thanks for the reply. I want to point out that I did not say there are no wrong takes. I said that as laypersons we are not qualified to figure out which takes are “wrong” (really, less well-supported). Yeah, I could spend days/weeks/months examining all the available evidence to try to figure out for myself whether Truitt’s or Pomata’s view is right (really, better-supported)… but there’s not enough time in the day to do that for every single academic disagreement I come across. So we end up having to rely on experts. But when two experts (or two camps of experts) disagree, what’s a layperson to do?
Wow, late medieval Lower Saxony, that’s ultra-specific. What drew you to that specific region and era? I’m not an academic, but I lived in southern Hessen for awhile, so the Pfalz phase of the Thirty Years War particularly interests me, since I’m familiar with the geography of the area.
The only thing I would add to this is, sometimes the truth actually is a knowable thing. You learn it through this process. I generally don’t agree with people who just shrug and say well maybe everybody and nobody is right, we’ll never know! Because that’s kind of intellectual nihilism. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that letter to the editor in the abstract. Hey, current scholarship actually indicates XYZ, maybe not ABC. But to post it in a weirdly triumphalist “You morons!” way is unhelpful. (“I was appalled…I was particularly dismayed….” Please, let go of your pearls.) The tone strikes me as “why didn’t you call me or my friends?”The other piece of this is that old scholarship and old ways of thinking do hold younger people and new ideas back. Maybe talking to the eminence grise should NOT always be the go-to move. This is the eternal push and pull, I guess.
I don’t really have any objection to Truitt’s letter; it’s really just the thoughtless perspective of the A.V. Club article itself, that because person B corrected person A, we’re going to assume that person B must be correct and person A must be wrong, that annoys me.
If you’re a journalist, how do you tell which academic is the best? If you’re not well versed in a field, and 2 academics disagree about something, how do you know which is the better answer?
It can be tough, but getting a quick sense of the field by either reading book reviews or getting in touch with a handful of different people can get you there. If you are a journalist, I would hope that you would be familiar with the basics of research and would be able to vet your sources. In this case, I would have encouraged the author to talk to someone who is not emerita, but rather folks currently working in the field.
Bonus points for this guy. From the point of view of someone who is not an expert, how do you know which of two conflicting experts is the one you should listen to? It might take years of study to figure it out on your own; you’ve got to pick one, and even if you have the New Yorker luxury of taking weeks or months to write an article, you can’t put it off forever or forgo all your other work in order to do enough research to determine on your own which scholar’s opinion is better-supported.
You talk to the one with the better six-pack.
But it’s not “out of date”. These are more like two dueling schools of thought. Not geocentrism vs heliocentrism. One isn’t objectively correct.
Perhaps. But to me its not clear here who knows more than the other.Sure, this guy wrote an angry letter with rebuttals. It doesn’t mean that he’s right.
There’s probably even another medieval scholar out there who is going to say this letter is wrong, and the original take is correct. I tend to reserve “oh you got owned!” for wildly interpretive fields unless there’s a consensus.
This is what I was getting at – basically, the headline and thrust of this post (and honestly, the letter too) are a bit melodramatic.
This article—from the CDC—is more consistent with the New Yorker article’s perspective. Who knows, maybe the infectious-disease specialist is a greater authority on this than a medievialst? https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article
“There’s probably even another medieval scholar out there who is going to say this letter is wrong”No, there isn’t.
What do you think… TIM?!I majored in boggy creek studies, so I can pretty much write my own ticket.
Most of the things the article gets wrong are facts, not opinions. That Cicero was somehow “forgotten” in the Middle Ages until Petrarch rediscovered him, for example, is simply factually wrong. Laughably so. So, no, there are no medieval scholars out there saying the letter is wrong. Because they know it isn’t.
Goodnight, Tim, wherever you are
I have no oar in this race, but your comment reminds me of WE! DO! NOT! TALK! ABOUT! THE! ORANGUTANG! which is the single greatest thing to happen to the internet.
i’m always up for a good story about the plague!
Uh oh. Is this one of those “dryly and factually naming the origin of that disease is xenophobic!” things?
If this disease could be transmitted by a vector like a flea, then why is it so implausible that a corpse flung into the city could have led to infections among the living inhabitants? Presumably the besiegers did not rid the bodies of fleas before throwing them in.
This article presents a bit more of a nuanced view (to wit: it likely happened as described and it was a successful example of biological warfare, but it was just an anecdote; the plague was transmitted by mass movements of goods and people) than simply, “Fake News! Xenophobia!”
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article
Also, I wouldn’t use “Anglocentric” to describe a myth originating in Italy about an event that happened to an Italian trading outpost in eastern Europe, even though, of course, the plague did eventually ravage England as well.
Fleas and lice desert a body as it cools. Quite rapidly, too.
This. Blood rapidly coagulated after death. Fleas and lice need fresh blood.An invading army could very well have infected a city. Not by the use of dead bodies as biological warfare, but simply from the rats that would have likely followed that army.
I mean it’s pretty pedantic anyways, decaying bodies are definitely vectors for disease— they may not directly spread the plague, but it’s not like it couldn’t be harmful in a multitude of other ways. And rats are opportunistic feeders so uh, having a bunch of “food” as it were isn’t going to reduce the number of rats and fleas. Dumping a bunch of corpses in a city generally isn’t done in good faith anyways I assume.Tracing the origins of a disease isn’t xenophobic— people who assume people from areas of the origin of a disease are automatically riddled with it are xenophobic shitheads. Per usual the problem is people, not the science.
I think it’s irresponsible to cast scholarly debate as a game where some loser gets dunked on by some winner. I’m sure Wright would have his own reasonable rejoinder to this, and on and on. This is what scholarship looks like. It isn’t a competition.
Hell hath no fury like an expert within an obscure subject who notices something incorrect in a mainstream publication.
Nearly all that is taught as “history” is, at best, incomplete. At worst, it is outright lies. History is written by those who had a desired outcome. Often at the great cost of those whose outcomes were quite a lot more dire.
Elly Truitt errs on a couple of statements. First, that it’s not possible to be infected with Plague from a corpse. A corpse thrown with enough force to make it over a fortress wall would burst open upon landing, exposing anyone nearby, especially those cleaning it up, to the infected interior which would allow direct contamination. Secondarily, bathing was so infrequent at that time that many individuals carried fleas. The infected fleas would abandon a dead body in droves once their blood source dried up, and then jump to the nearest live body. The fleas would usually vector thru rats first, but there was nothing to stop the fleas from jumping from human to human. “The mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” Secondly, grain shipments were not coming from Caffa, but were being sent to Caffa because the city was under siege. When plague came, those who could leave by ship went first to Constantinople, not directly to Messina and Genoa. Plague arrived in Constantinople shortly thereafter, and then people left in droves to multiple destinations, with the plague following. The dates are well documented, implying that most likely it was spread via ship. As we are centuries removed, it’s not possible to trace with absolute precision how the plague was spread thru Europe (via ship or overland), but via ship is the most plausible. COVID-19 did not spread to America overland, either. It should be noted that the Medieval plague is believed to have started in the Russian steppes and traveled east and west overland thru various trade routes. Once it hit coastal shipping ports it spread worldwide much more rapidly.It’s thought that Plague has been in Europe for about 3000 years. It did not affect the Romans too badly — they bathed. Even today, between one thousand and three thousand cases occur worldwide, but antibiotics keep the death rate low.
Excellent reply by Truitt, even if it’s basically nitpicking part of the piece. Like he said, only the pneumonic form was transmitted person-to-person, and most of it transmitted by fleas on the bodies of rats. That’s part of why Yersinia Pestis was so devastating both in the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian – it could easily spread out from cities into the countryside, following the rats. And it was crazy lethal. IIRC the survival rate for Bubonic Plague without antibiotics treatment was something like 2% – almost everyone who got it died, and the survivors were almost entirely people who managed to dodge it for one reason or another (the rare exception ironically including Justinian himself, who was part of that lucky 2% reportedly).
I didn’t get all the fancy words down, but it seems like the story is:New Yorker: Pandemic and white people are good!Educated Person: Pandemic bad. White people can be racist.New Yorker: FAKE NEWS!!!!!
“Good Day to You, SIR”
Now I wish I had one of those old-tyme plague masks for this whole COVID-19 bullshit. Like one of these masks:
This is what passes for intellectuals these days. They mentioned pneumonic human to human as if it’s the only way, case closed, they’ll have their PhD now. Life long history nut and I’ve worked with infectious diseases for years.They don’t just launch dead bodies, living ones are even better because of the screaming playing into psychological warfare. Living people are also more likely to be carrying/spread fleas. A flung person could have lived long enough for a defender to rush over to the dying man and breath the same air. While that may sound far fetched, The 1618 Defenestration of Prague is a decent strawman. Said man could have fleas which leave his corpse for something close by to feed on. Also put prisoners you think you can trade something for near the infected, then ransom them. They walk into the city and start spreading it pneumonically.Have to wait for this to pass but the plague benefiting the survivors is wrong how according to them?