The Justinianic Plague: an interdisciplinary review Merle Eisenberg Princeton University merlee@princeton.edu Lee Mordechai National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland lmordechai@sesync.org This article is a detailed critical review of all the major scholarly publications in the rapidly expanding field of the Justinianic Plague published from 2000 through 2018. It updates the article in this journal by Dionysios Stathakopoulos from 2000, while also providing a detailed appraisal of the state of the field across all disciplines, including: literary studies, archaeology, DNA evidence, climatology, and epidemiology. We also identify the current paradigm for the Justinianic Plague as well as survey possible avenues forward for the field in the future. 1 Keywords: Justinianic Plague; pandemics; ancient DNA; climate change; end of Antiquity Introduction The Justinianic Plague and the first plague pandemic that followed have enjoyed a substantial increase in scholarly and public attention over the last few decades. This article attempts to offer a useful starting point for scholars in all fields to assess the current state of the study of the Justinianic Plague in hope of increasing interdisciplinary collaboration and raising awareness of key issues while reducing circular reasoning. It builds upon the substantial increase in Justinianic Plague research since the beginning of the 21st century and updates the survey of Dionysios © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2019 DOI: 10.1017/byz.2019.10 1 We would like to thank Tim Newfield and the two anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Princeton’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative provided an instrumental platform for the refinement and discussion of the ideas behind this paper. This survey is comprehensive through 2018. Due to publication schedules we were able to include only brief references to a few studies from 2019. We use the term ‘Justinianic Plague’ in this article as a shorthand to refer to all outbreaks of plague from c. 541–750 since that remains the most commonly used term to discuss the first pandemic. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 43 (2) 156–180 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/byz.2019.10 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Maryland College Park, on 10 Sep 2019 at 12:49:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,