Researchers have given medieval Cambridge residents the ‘Richard III treatment’ to reveal the hard-knock lives of those who lived in the city during the University's earliest years.
‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th–8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.
New research dates plague back to the early Bronze Age, showing it had been endemic in humans across Eurasia for millennia prior to the first recorded global outbreak, and that ancestral plague mutated into its bubonic, flea-borne form between the 2nd and 1st millennium BC.
A new research project is compiling the largest database of plague imagery ever amassed, focusing on a pandemic that peaked in the early 20th century and continues to this day.
© 2025 University of Cambridge