Projects and Publications
Publications
Speculum 100, no. 2 (2025): 321–364
Janet E. Kay, István Koncz, Jordan Wilson, Rachel Singer, Merle Eisenberg, Lee Mordechai, and Timothy P. Newfield
Archaeological evidence from funerary contexts is largely ignored in current scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic, despite the important information that burials and cemeteries can provide about how plague might have affected societies. Skeletal (mainly dental) remains are used in the paleogenomic search for victims of plague (Yersinia pestis), but significant contextual information is to be gained from plague-positive graves through bioarchaeological study of the complete individual and their broader funerary context, both of which are largely absent from current scholarship. We argue that future scholarship on the First Plague Pandemic must bring burial archaeology to the growing body of evidence, and archaeologists themselves must lead or be involved in this research. We present three ways in which burial archaeology can be used effectively to study the impact of first-pandemic plague on individuals and communities: by reconsidering whether we should be looking for an archaeology of “crisis” for this disease event, by evaluating burial archaeology (especially of multiple burials) in its proper sociocultural context, and by examining bioarchaeological evidence from entire cemeteries where plague genomes are recovered in any quantity. We conclude by offering an example of how such archaeological evidence can be more inclusively and effectively incorporated into interdisciplinary plague studies, to the benefit of the field.
English Historical Review 139, no. 600 (2024): 992 –1026
The 2019 discovery of Yersinia pestis ancient DNA at Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire unquestionably confirms that plague was present in sixth-century Britain. Prior treatments of this evidence have decontextualised it from its British setting, considering it aside from the richly studied British archaeological and textual records, to detrimental effect. This article considers this new evidence in context, presenting a historiography of early medieval British epidemics and a summary of current scientific knowledge of the topic to contend that the discovery marks a significant shift in our understanding of early British plague and to clarify what palaeoscientific data can and cannot tell us about plague’s presence in and its impact on Britain. It then argues a new theory of the spread of plague based on recent developments in our understanding of British demographics, ecology and trade routes, contending that early first-pandemic Y. pestis was transmitted to Britain at least two distinct times via separate routes, with the first introduction potentially pre-dating the introduction of plague to Constantinople in 542 CE. The article then reflects on why British sources have been omitted from or misused in plague scholarship, arguing that this trend speaks to British history’s damaging insularity and to methodological issues within plague studies. It concludes by connecting this issue to wider geographical hierarchies within scholarship on Late Antiquity and suggests ways in which future plague scholarship can respond to these challenges.
Early Medieval Europe 30, no. 2 (2022): 185–202
Scholars of Gregory of Tours have paid little regard to the specific role of Basina in the nuns’ rebellion at Sainte-Croix abbey in Poitiers. Their inattention mirrors Gregory’s narrative of the ‘scandal’, which presents Basina as Clotild’s more passive and reluctant sidekick, whereas the judgement of the bishops’ tribunal that tried the rebellion’s leaders characterizes them as equally blameworthy. This article examines Basina’s role in the ‘scandal’ in detail and argues that she was a more active participant than Gregory chose to suggest. It then seeks to explain why Gregory minimized Basina’s involvement and examines what his portrayal of her contributes to our understanding of his manipulation of historical events.
Journal of Medieval Worlds 2, no. 3–4 (2020): 115–123
The Black Death in the Maghreb is severely understudied. There is little scholarship on the Maghrebi experience of the second pandemic in general. That which exists bases its conclusions on Al-Andalusi and Middle Eastern sources and does not incorporate the paleoscientific data which has shed light on plague outbreaks for which there is less traditional evidence. As a result, little is known about the Maghrebi Black Death, and this ignorance is detrimental to our understanding of the Black Death in adjacent regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper surveys the existing scholarship on plague in fourteenth-century North Africa and argues that the field both needs and deserves further attention. It then suggests directions for further study grounded in an interdisciplinary approach incorporating paleoscience, plague ecology, archaeology, and a reexamination of Maghrebi primary texts.
Ongoing Projects
Dissertation:
The Diseased Landscapes of Early Britain and Ireland: Infection, Migration, and Disability in the First Millennium, CE
Britain and Ireland have dense and diverse evidence for first-millennium infectious disease. Yet, scholars of the region neglect the historical agency of disease and scholars of first-millennium disease largely neglect the region. This project combines textual, bioarchaeological, paleogenomic, and paleoecological evidence with insights from epidemiology and disability studies to advance scholarly understanding of early British infectious disease on individual and societal scales and to argue it played a significant role in the early history of northwest insular Europe. It uses Britain and Ireland's rich evidentiary record to test interdisciplinary methodologies pioneered in Euro-Mediterranean history and seeks to combat the marginalization of chronically ill and disabled people from histories which intimately concern them.
Book Project:
Marionettes:
Rebel Nuns and the Ethics of History
My second book project examines a incident in which forty cloistered nuns illegally left their convent, gathered an army, sacked their own abbey, abducted their abbess, and somehow got away with it all scot-free. Only one source for these events survives: Gregory of Tours' heavily manipulated and didactic Ten Books of Histories. This study argues, however, that three distinct perspectives of the rebellion are preserved in Gregory's Histories, and that only by identifying, disarticulating, and interrogating them can we come to an objective understanding of the nuns' actions and motivations. The study sheds light on sixth-century Merovingian gender relations and reveals how bias which originated 1400 years ago can permeate modern understandings of historical events.
Article-Length Projects
I have several article-length projects in-progress which focus on disaster and climate change in Gildas' De excidio Britonum, on how climate history can help policymakers address current anthropogenic warming, and on the early history of smallpox in Britain. Watch this space for updates!