The slave trade was nothing new in Madagascar. Arabmerchants had been taking advantage of internal wars to extractcaptives since the Middle Ages.

monastic scribes in the Middle Ages who not only employed it, but expanded it to around 14,000 symbols. (!) Most of the documentation dates from the Carolingian dynasty in the 8th and 9th centuries.

But most of humanity—not just medieval people—lacked the ability to fight infections or even under-stand how they spread for much of history. England during the Renaissance suffered regular deadly outbreaks of plague, smallpox, syphilis, typhus, malaria, and a mysterious illness called “sweating sickness.” Upon contact with Europeans, upwards of 95 per cent of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were killed by European diseases. Plagues even rav-aged the twentieth century: from 1918–1920, half a billion 14 / The Devil’s Historianspeople were infected with the Spanish Flu global pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. And let’s not forget that we are currently living with the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS

In the Middle Ages, just the opposite was true. Reading was generally done aloud, often to an audience. It was an active process, so active that Susan Noakes, in her analysis of medieval reading, points out “that it had been recommended by physicians, since classical times, as a mild form of exercise, like walking.”