Since 2014, when The Medieval Globe first presented the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the Black Death as a global pandemic, the pace and intensity of research has intensified. This follow-up volume features two extended essays laying out evidence that the Second Plague Pandemic was already ravaging China by the second quarter of the thirteenth century—over a century before it made its appearance in the greater Mediterranean region. In a core contribution, Robert Hymes presents an extensive analysis of Chinese medical texts, showing that physicians were adapting their terminology and treatments to the emergence of a virulent new disease: plague. In an overarching essay, Monica H. Green summarizes the current state of our knowledge about the timing and expanse of the Black Death, showing how combined evidence from genetics and a reconstructed documentary record can create a coherent new narrative of one of the largest, and longest, pandemics in history.

This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sciences to address the question of how recent work in the genetics, zoology, and epidemiology of plague's causative organism (Yersinia pestis) can allow a rethinking of the Black Death pandemic and its larger historical significance.