The history of the Black Death constitutes one of the most interdisciplinary fields of Renaissance and Reformation studies, bringing together not only a wide spectrum of scholars in the humanities and social sciences—students of literature, art history, economics, anthropology, demography—but also scholars across scientific disciplines such as archaeology, biology, zoology, genetics, dentistry, and more. Modern scholarship and enthusiasm for the subject have closely followed major outbreaks of epidemic diseases threatening Europe: the cholera epidemics of the 1830s (when the term “Black Death” became common in the English language for the disease’s outbreak from 1346 to 1352), the spread of bubonic plague (later christened Yersinia pestis) in 1894 to World War I, and most recently, the spread of HIV/AIDS from the mid-1980s to the present.