THE ESSAYS THAT make up Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death grew out of dialogue first begun in 2009. The volume itself began to come together in the spring of 2013 and was sent to press a year later. Little did we know that by the time the volume would appear in November 2014, the world's relationship to epidemic infectious disease would have taken such an abrupt turn. At the time of this writing, the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic has already caused over twenty-one thousand cases and taken over eight thousand lives.1 Declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on August 8, 2014 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Ebola outbreak prompted a United Nations (UN) Security Council meeting several weeks later. At that session on September 18, the resulting UN resolution called the outbreak a “threat to international peace and security,” garnering the highest level of support in the history of the organization. The West African Ebola outbreak has disrupted the economies and trade relations of countries in West Africa and beyond. It has decimated the already strained healthcare personnel of the three most affected countries. It has left hundreds of children orphaned and disrupted the education and welfare of many thousands more. For the families whose loved ones make up those statistics, no relativizing of numbers can offer solace. From the perspective of the devastated countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun's bleak assessment of the world after the Black Death could just as well have been written today.

Plague is not Ebola Virus Disease. Many of the easy parallels that were drawn in the popular press in mid-2014 between the unfolding Ebola outbreak and the medieval Black Death were exaggerated or careless. In several respects, Ebola is better compared to other diseases. The current Ebola epidemic has brought back memories of the 2002–2003 SARS epidemic, whose intercontinental spread was also abetted by airline travel; or the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has been surrounded by intense debates about drug development and ethical provision of treatment.