Epidemic times: epidemic ontologies and temporalities in medieval islamic medicine.

Recent scholarship on the Black Death has uncovered crucial new insights into the disease and its spread, and has charted ways for historians to collaborate with the biological sciences. However, this approach has emphasized the primacy of a modern Western biomedical ontology that understands the disease and its spread through Yersinia pestis. In Islamic history, this meant a focus on tracing how medieval authors distinguished modern biological plague symptoms from those of other conditions, when and where the disease first emerged. Building on postcolonial methodological approaches, this article sidesteps modern biological categories and focuses on the construction of plague as a medieval disease, regardless of its relationship to modern biological plague. The article argues that the disease should be understood within an expansive, inclusive epistemology that focuses on the epidemic's mortality. It uses this approach to investigate the temporal structures that governed the disease, its perception, and management.