UNIVERSITY of GLASGOW

History
Part of the Faculty of Arts
home > departments > History > Staff > Academic staff > Samuel Cohn
Samuel K Cohn

Professor Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr.

Professor of Medieval History
Department of History (Medieval)
10 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141-330-4369
Fax: 0141 330 2348
Email: S.Cohn@history.arts.gla.ac.uk

Office hours: Professor Cohn is on research leave this semester


Research Interests

  • Italian Social History, History of Women, Demographic History, Popular Revolts in Europe, History of anti-Semitism in late Medieval Europe; History of Disease, History of Plague, Evolution

    Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 'In Our Time' on 22 May 08 on the the Black Death: Melvyn Bragg, Miri Rubin and Paul Binski discuss how the 14th-century plague affected every aspect of medieval life including belief, art, work and politics.  Click here to download the programme (45 mins, 20 Mb)
  • I am currently finishing a book on Disease and culture in early modern Italy funded by a project grant from the Wellcome Trust. It investigates the evolution of plague from 1348 to 1600 and changes in the character of the disease, culture, ideas and mentality.
  • I have received a Project Grant from the ESRC (RES-000-22-2339) to compile databases and research ‘Popular Protest in Late Medieval Towns’ (October 2007-October 2010).  Dr Douglas Aiton is the full-time research assistant on this project.
  • I am interested ithe history of the persecution of the Jews during the Middle Ages and may develop my recent Past & Present article ('The Black Death and the burning of the Jews' doi 10.1093/pastj/gtm005) into a monograph on the subject.

Research students

  • Douglas Aiton (Ph.D award, November 2007: 'Shame on him also allows them to live': The Jacquerie of 1358), currently my research assistant on the ESRC project
  • Bryan D. Dick, Piracy During the Hundred Years War (writing-up)
  • Neil Murphy, Royal Ceremonies in Late Medieval France (writing-up)
  • Katherine Wilson, Burgundian Tapestries (writing-up)


Teaching

Honours courses:

  • Special Subject: The Black Death and the Transformation of the West
  • Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe
  • Renaissance Italy
  • The History of Childhood from Ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance
  • The History of Disease in Western Europe 1348-1600 (Berkeley, University of California)

Postgraduate courses:


Publications

RAE outputs

1. ‘The Black Death and the burning of the Jews’, Past & Present, no. 196 (August, 2007): 3-45.
2. ‘After the Black Death: Labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late-medieval western Europe’, Economic History Review, 60: 3 (August 2007): 457-485.
3. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Edward Arnold, May, 2002 in the UK and Oxford University Press, in the US), xii+318 pp. ISBN 0 340 70646 5 (Hb); ISBN 0 349 70647 3 (Pb)
4. Lust for Liberty: The politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge, Ma., Harvard University Press, 2006). ISBN 0-674-02162-2; x+376 pp.

Other RAE outputs

1. Popular protest in late medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders  Medieval Sources Series. Manchester University Press (October, 2004), xxiv+389 pp. ISBN 0 7190 6730 8 hardback; 0 7190 6731 6 paperback

2. ‘Two Pictures of Family Ideology taken from the Dead in Post-Plague Flanders and Tuscany’, in The Household in Late Medieval Cities, Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared, ed. Mariam Carlier  & Tim Soens (Louvain: Garant, 2001), pp. 165-78.

3. ‘The Black Death: End of a paradigm’, American Historical Review, 107, no. 3, June, 2002, pp. 703-38.
Also published in Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times, ed. Joseph Canning, Hartmut Lehmann and Jay Winter (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 25-66.

4. ‘The Black Death’, in Encyclopedia of Population, Revised edition, ed. Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan, 2002), I, pp. 98-101 (double columns).

5. ‘The other Florence within Florence’, in Beyond Florence: The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy, ed. Paula Findlen, Michelle Fontaine, and Duane Osheim (Stanford, 2003), pp. 33-44.

6. ‘The Marginality of Mountaineers in Renaissance Florence’ in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, ed. Stephen Milner, Medieval Cultures series, no. 39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 302-17

7. ‘Popular insurrection and the Black Death: a comparative view’ in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, ed. C. Dyer and C. Wickham, Past & Present Publications (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006).

8. Culture and Memory after the Black Death: ‘Triumph over Plague’ in Sorge für das Diesseits und das Jenseits: Die Funktion der Kunst in der Memoria im Mittelalter, ed. Truus van Bueren (Amsterdam: Brepols, 2005), pp. 35-54.

9. ‘Europa 1348 – 1400. Los desastres de la peste negra y la pintura’, in Summa Pictorica, II: El Esplendor de la Edad Media, ed. Joan Sureda (Madrid: Editorial Planeta. S. A., 2005), pp. 89-104.

10. ‘Bandiere e parole: Le rivolte popolari al nord e al sud delle Alpi (1200-1425)’, in Simboli e rituali nelle città toscane tra Medioevo e prima Età moderna. Atti del convegno internazionale (Arezzo, 21-22 maggio 2004), ed. Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Franco Franceschi (Arezzo, 2006), pp. 93-103.

11. ‘Flags and words: popular revolt north and south of the Alps, c. 1200-1425’, Ritual in the Early Modern World: Essays presented to Richard C. Trexler, ed. Peter Arnade and Michael Rocke (Binghamton, N.Y, forthcoming).

12. ‘Highlands and lowlands in late Medieval Tuscany’, in Mìorun Mòr nan Gall?: The Great Ill-Will of the Lowlander, ed. Martin MacGregor and Davit Broun 

13. ‘Popular revolt and the rise of early modern states’, The Historian: The magazine of The Historical Association, 89 (2006): 26-33.

14. ‘The Black Death, Tragedy and Transformation’, The Renaissance World, ed. John Martin (New York: Rutledge, 2007), pp. 69-83.

15. ‘Black Death and AIDS: CCR5-?32 in Genetics and History’ with Professor Lawrence Weaver, M.D., The Quarterly Journal of Medicine 99 (2006): 497-503.

16. ‘La pecularità degli Inglesi e le rivolte del tardo medievo’, in Rivolte urbane e rivolte contadine nell’Europa del Trecento: un confronto, ed. Giuliano Pinto and Monique Bourin, to appear in 2007.

17. Cohn and Guido Alfani, 'Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy' Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxviii:2 (Autumn, 2007): 177-205.

Major books

The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York:  Academic Press, 1980) in Studies in Social Discontinuity Series, directed by Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter, xiv+296 pp.

Death and Property in Siena 1205-1800:  Strategies for the Afterlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), xx+330 pp.

The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xiv+429 pp. (reprinted in paperback, 1997).

Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy, edited and introduced by Samuel Cohn, Jr. and Steven Epstein (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), viii+472 pp.

Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xii+250 pp.

with David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1997), x+122 pp.

Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348-1434 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xv+308 pp.

The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London: Edward Arnold, May, 2002 in the UK and Oxford University Press, in the US), xii+318 pp. ISBN 0 340 70646 5 (Hb); ISBN 0 349 70647 3 (Pb)

Popular protest in late medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders  Medieval Sources Series. Manchester University Press (October, 2004), xxiv+389 pp. ISBN 0 7190 6730 8 hardback; 0 7190 6731 6 paperback

Lust for Liberty: The politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge, Ma., Harvard University Press, 2006). ISBN 0-674-02162-2; x+376 pp.

Articles published in Studi Storici, English Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Economic History Review, Past & Present, American Historical Review, Annales: Histoire, Science Sociales, The Quarterly Journal of Medicine.


Scholarly activities

  • Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association for Death and Propoerty in Siena
  • NEH Book Publishing Award for The Cult of Remembrance
  • The Black Transformed, selected by Eric J. Hobsbawm as one of the books of historical interest, BBC History Magazine, Christmas Issue.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 1982?83
  • Getty Foundation Project Grant in Art History, 1988-1989
  • Villa I Tatti Fellowship, 1993-94
  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1994-95
  • Wellcome Trust, Unit for the History of Medicine Project Grant, 1998-2000
  • Visiting Professor, Santa Fe Institute, July, 2000.
  • Visiting Professor, American Academy in Rome, September, 2000-April, 2001
  • Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, December, 2001
  • Visiting professor at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, May, 2005
  • Georgetown 'classics in Italian historiography' prize for 2007: subvention to translate into Italian my The Black Death Transformed
  • The Crayenborgh lecture at Leiden University, March, 2006
  • Wellcome Project Grant, 15 January 2006 – 14 January 2009
  • ‘Distinguished Visiting Professor’ at University of California, Berkeley, Winter Semester 2008.
  • ESRC Project Grant to study popular protest in late medieval English Towns (1 October 2007 to 30 September 2009).