A highly engaging and fascinating listen! I much enjoyed listening to this lady's manner of presentation. ( )

Further continuing my mission this year of rereading old favorites I haven't read (or listened to) for a while, I went back to this Great Course about the Black Plague, particularly because choosing this topic would also allow me to fulfill some requirements for a reading challenge I am doing on GoodReads to read two books about the same topic (for my second book for this part of the challenge, I'll be revisiting Year of Wonders). I chose the Black Death as my topic because I am morbid that way. :) Also, this is just a good time of year to read spooky and chilling things (especially nonfiction!) of this nature.

This was one of the first of the Great Courses I listened to. I have listened to it several times, and each time I learn more and enjoy it more.

Dorsey is an engaging lecturer, and the organization and thoroughness of her 24 lectures on this topic are exemplary, particularly when you consider the absolute vastness of this topic and what it must have been like to sensibly condense it into 12 hours of listening. I didn't come away feeling like she had left anything out or hadn't explored an important aspect.

To have the full picture of the Black Death, we must traverse into the areas of religion, art, science, literature and poetry, economics, war, politics, medicine, epidemiology, philosophy, psychology, demographics, and even astronomy and astrology. (In Medieval times, astronomy and astrology were basically indivisible, treated equally seriously, and [among other avenues] were both explored to try to explain where the plague came from, why it happened, etc. This is very different from modern times where there is a clear line between the two, in that astronomy is a science that studies objects and phenomena in space and astrology is kind of like fortune-telling that uses the movement and position of celestial objects to divine information. This is just one of the fascinating insights into the past that you learn while listening to this!)

You learn how a "Black Swan" event (the word "black" is coincidental here; this is a metaphor to refer to impossible-to-predict happenings that occur outside the realm of normal expectation and has major effects) like the Black Death brought out both the darkest and the lightest sides of humanity, how it shaped the modern world we live in today, and that we are still learning about (and from) this horrifying time in history which ravaged communities most thoroughly from 1347 - 1352 and in subsequent years almost on the decade until the mid 1600s.

Though the subject matter is disturbing and dark, we cannot understand where we are now or where we are going if we don't understand where we came from. I think this is why I have always loved history (particularly Medieval History) from an early age so much and why I try not to shy away from uncomfortable (even horrifying) topics like this one. If your interests are the same, I highly recommend listening to this! ( )