On the tsunami of other social changes wrought by the Black Death, Kelly is more persuasive -- if decidedly derivative, echoing what many scholars before him have observed.
In many parts of Europe, the plague claimed a third of the population (in some areas, as much as 60 percent), and this devastating loss of life, Kelly argues, "may have saved Europe from an indefinite future of subsistence existence," breaking the Malthusian deadlock of rapid demographic growth and rapidly diminishing resources.
The devastation wrought by the Black Death, he goes on, helped "allow the continent to recapture its momentum," resulting in a larger share of resources for survivors and a wave of human ingenuity as people sought technological solutions to an acute labor shortage.
Echoing Cantor, he says that the plague also led to a "privatization" of religion and a deepening disillusionment with the Church -- thereby, perhaps, preparing the groundwork for the Reformation. It led, too, he adds, to innovations in the fields of education and medicine and to the birth of public health programs.
In fact, Kelly concludes his gory chronicle on a remarkably optimistic note: "Horrific as a century of unremitting death had been, Europe emerged from the charnel house of pestilence and epidemic cleansed and renewed -- like the sun after rain."
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