The Forgotten Plague The Black Death In Sweden Summary

Janken Myrdal’s description throughout, “The Forgotten Plague: The Black Death in Sweden” consisted with using Swedish sources and other sources to give descriptions of the plague in different areas. He starts with describing how the black death was named by a Swedish author in 1540 that was originally translated from Latin. Myrdal explains, “Probably the expression originally was a translation of Latin ‘pestis artra’ or ‘mors artra’, where Latin ‘after’ is black, but also sinister or ominous in Swedish as in many other languages”. (141) He then uses different sources to speak about the cultures history, the late medieval plague sequence, the mortality rate, description of the disease and the toll on agriculture and society. He organizes his article through the topics while using sources to describe each topic in different times and regions.

The way the author supported his claims was by describing how he organized the data he used and why he used it the way it was used. For example, he organized the wills, charters and letters per year to seek the average and highest for a certain span of time. While pinpointing where the highest average

The late medieval plagued sequence described how many plagues occurred during a certain amount of time. The mortality rate described the rate at which the people especially peasants would die during the plagues. The disease was then described using sources of what the disease could be that caused the plague. The consequence of the disease in agriculture was described by the aftermath of the disease like on how the farms were used and innovations created to improve agriculture. The society also changed after the plague took form by peasants having an increase in wealth because of the improvements created to improve