Reading the Yellow Death: Pandemic, Climate, and Memory in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland

Abstract

The First Plague Pandemic ravaged Europe and the Mediterranean from its appearance in 541 through the middle of the eighth century. Until recently, little evidence existed to concretely link plague to an enigmatic disease event in Britain and Ireland called the mortalitas magna in Latin and ‘the Yellow Death’ in the vernacular. Motivated by the recent emergence of molecular evidence proving plague’s presence in Britain and Ireland, this dissertation investigates the textual tradition of the Yellow Death through the framework of current advances in plague studies. The first half of this dissertation collates and assesses all attested references to mass mortality within the Insular textual record of the sixth and seventh centuries. These events are analysed for a potential identity of plague and contextualised within the wider history of the First Plague Pandemic in Europe and the Mediterranean. Significantly, this study identifies four plague amplification events (545–554, 576, 664–670, and 680–684) and proposes models for the transmission of plague into the Insular world. The second half of this dissertation assesses the textual history of plague, examining how memory of the pandemic shaped the development of medical vocabulary and hagiographic tropes. By tracing the references to the ‘Yellow Death’ from the first Insular annals entries of the sixth century through to the writings of Gerald of Wales in the twelfth, this dissertation demonstrates that despite patchy multi-linguistic textual record, there was a continuous shared textual memory of plague across all three major Insular literary traditions (Irish, Welsh/Breton, and English) from the end of the pandemic until the beginning of the Second Plague Pandemic in the fourteenth century.