The Great Mortality (2005)

The Black Death through the eyes of people who lived through it. Much of Kelly's narrative rests on the accounts of monks, doctors and other literate witnesses who nursed the sick and buried the dead, which gives the book a ground-level view that most plague histories lack. It is frank about what medieval medicine could and could not do, from Paris physicians consulting the stars for cures to the hunt for scapegoats that ended with Jews burned at the stake. Specialists find his reading of how people reacted a little predictable, but as a first book on the plague it is vivid, humane and easy to follow.