Portland Classical and Medieval Book Club

This vivid account the Plague moves beyond Christian Europe to the Muslim Near East, illustrating the truly international impact of humanity's greatest scourge on the medieval world.

In 1347, a catastrophic plague fell on Europe and its neighbors, halving entire populations and causing untold suffering. The Black Death is, without question, one of the defining episodes in our history, and yet, one critical fact too often gets sidelined in our discussions of the this disease was not solely, or even primarily, a European phenomenon, but rather a catastrophe that touched the whole medieval world, oncluding the Muslim near and Middle East, the Byzantine Empire, north Africa and Asia.

Thomas Asbridge, a historian at Queen Mary University of London, Asbridge treats the Black Death as the truly international phenomenon that it was, crisscrossing the globe to follow the plague’s appearance. Compiling over seven years of research, Asbridge brings the drama of this era to life through hundreds of eyewitness accounts. We're introduced to characters like Ibn al-Wardi, the Muslim writer who witnessed the plague’s onset in Syria, or Ibn Khaldun, who survived the Black Death in Tunis, and went on to develop a new academic framework for the study of human history. We meet people of all walks of kings and queens, peasants and merchants, and we also revisit familiar characters, like Chaucer and Petrarch, to get a sense of what it must have felt like to live through this period of horrific uncertainty.

As Thomas Asbridge masterfully demonstrates, reducing the story of the Black Death to a Western narrative not only limits our view of the past, but it also makes it impossible to appreciate the pandemic’s true scale and long-term significance. The immediate repercussions of the Black Death, Asbridge shows us, were often felt most severely in the Muslim not only were mortality rates often higher, but the aftermath of disease weakened the mighty Mamluk Empire, contributing to its eventual fall.

The Black Death first evokes the palpable existential terror of living through this plague, and with graceful clarity, illuminates its effects on almost every aspect of medieval life, including attitudes toward religion and death, the conduct of trade, the balance of political power, and the very structure and fabric of society.

Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and translation experience, Emily Wilson—renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad—explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” translation styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world. Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classics background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.

A modern classic of historical fiction written in the form of Claudius's autobiography.

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus lived from 10 B.C. to 54 A.D. Despised as a weakling and dismissed as an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings that marked the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the mad Caligula to become emperor of Rome in 41 A.D. The first part of Robert Graves’s two-part account of the life of Tiberius Claudius, I, Claudius stands as a landmark historical novel of the 20th century from one of its great writers.