History's Peter Diehl to tell of little-known medieval plague during presentation Thursday

Associate Professor Peter Diehl has dedicated the majority of his professional career to teaching medieval history at Western Washington University. A faculty member since 1992, Diehl came to WWU after being a part-time instructor at UCLA, after the completion of his graduate work. Diehl says that jobs in his field were sparse in the early 1990s, and after he saw WWU’s attractive campus, he accepted Western’s job offer without hesitation.

Diehl adopted medieval history as his field of interest as an undergraduate.

“I was torn between either ancient or medieval history as a focus, but I found medieval history more stimulating,” he says. “It has more open questions than ancient history – where the number of sources is much more limited, and where people have been working them more thoroughly for hundreds of years.”

Diehl teaches a variety of classes within WWU’s history department, but all with some element of focus on medieval studies. From general undergraduate requirement courses like Introduction to Western Civilizations, to 400-level courses like Medieval Islamic Social History, Diehl reaches out to students at all phases of study within the history department. This Thursday at noon in Communications Facility Room 125, Diehl will be presenting his current research project, “Plague in Early Medieval Europe,” which was indirectly prompted by his 400-level course on medieval Italy.

A few years back, Diehl began the project of translating “History of the Lombards,” by Paul the Deacon. Written in refined sixth- and seventh-century Latin, this text is a history of the Lombard tribe and their presence in early medieval Italy from the 500s to the mid-700s. Diehl began the translation project after being unsatisfied with the pre-existing translation. While pursuing that project, he began to gain interest in Deacon’s references to the affects of the plague in Italy during that time. Unlike the thoroughly-researched Black Death, which happened hundreds of years later during the middle ages, this pandemic of plague in Italy has had scholarly research published in its regard only within the past 10 years.

Diehl was intrigued by the lack of scholarly work on the subject, and thus began his “Plague in Early Medieval Europe” project. Having worked on the project off and on for the past two years, Diehl says a research grant he received in the summer of 2009 has been a great help, although there is still work to be done before he feels it will be complete. Not only is he referencing the surviving literature on the subject, but he’s also researching evidence from archaeology and molecular biology of that period.

“First, I of course had to get acquainted with the existing scholarship on the subject, which has been quite intriguing for me, as a medieval historian who’s mostly worked on the later middle ages for my other research,” says Diehl of his research process. “I had to read up on the general history of the period more; but I also had to read up on the biomedical aspects of the disease and what the current research in molecular biology is finding out – and to get a little better acquainted with the archeology of the early medieval period as well. That provides us with some tantalizing bits and pieces of information, but it’s not as much as we’d like, because there are still some areas that haven’t been very thoroughly surveyed by archaeologists yet.”

Diehl says he has encountered a few small hindrances along the way – such as having to rely somewhat on translators to clarify sixth-century Latin text, and entirely on the texts written in Greek, as he does not read the language. With the variance in time from those periods he normally studies, this project will expand Diehl’s range and present the opportunity for publishing a scholarly article or two as well. Diehl also is considering compiling a small source reader that could be used as supplemental material for upper-division history classes.

Diehl is the third WWU faculty member to participate in this quarter’s series of faculty research presentations. These presentations are open to students, staff and community members of Bellingham who wish to learn more about university faculty members’ pursuits in their fields outside of the classroom.