Evidence that the Second Plague Pandemic was already ravaging China by the early thirteenth century--over a century before it made its virulent appearance in the Mediterranean.

Robert Hymes' work focuses on the social and cultural history of middle period and early modern China, drawing questions and sometimes data from cultural anthropology as well as history, and using the methods of the local historian to study elite culture, family and kinship, medicine, religion, gender, and the changing role and form of Chinese social networks from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries.