![]() ![]() Lectures that Herlihy consigned to his files perhaps should have rested there especially because as Cohn points out, Herlihy lived long enough to change his mind on some of the points made in “The Black Death and the Transformation of the West” and would surely not have published them in their present form, if at all.Īll the same, in the last four pages of his second lecture, Herlihy proposes a grand speculative idea about the demographic impact on Western Europe as the bubonic plague emerged from rat-infested holds of cargo ships and spread throughout most of Europe. ![]() Inviting others to disagree is, at best, a backhanded compliment to a revered scholar. Yet Cohn concludes: “No doubt the courageous interpretation and creative synthesis found in these three essays will stimulate other questions and objections, and it is in this that I see the principal merit of their posthumous publication.” The result is an odd sort of palimpsest for Cohn, who is a formidable scholar in his own right and goes out of his way to emphasize defects in Herlihy’s arguments and the limitations of his erudition. Cohn, and a set of notes in which both authors apparently had a hand. ![]() This slender volume sandwiches the text of three lectures delivered in 1985 by the renowned medievalist David Herlihy between an introduction prepared by his pupil, Samuel F. ![]()
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