Plagues in Early Modern Europe: History, Models and Representations: Online First
SPECIAL ISSUE ON COVID-19: ONLINE FIRST ARTICLES
Plagues in Early Modern Europe: History, Models, Representations and Metaphors
Epidemics are usually conceived of as sudden, devastating events against which there is no defence. Other features common to all descriptions of epidemics include a sense of seclusion, loneliness and deprivation, an altered perception of the physical world and of its symbolic topography, changed attitudes to human relationships, relegation to oblivion of practices considered holy, such as the burial of the dead, the inability of scientists to find a remedy or a cause, the folly of those in public power and of their provisions, the invention and persecution of scapegoats, or of criminals supposed to spread the contagion, the moral degradation which accompanies the disease...
More info PDF
More info PDF
***
Abstract:
Sir Thomas Browne’s little treatise is here published for the first time in an annotated version. It offers illuminating insights in how a prominent practicing physician and scholar from Norwich reacts to the plague hitting England in Early Modern times and the small help the medical knowledge about the plague from Paracelsus to Browne, which he examines with great learning.
Sir Thomas Browne’s little treatise is here published for the first time in an annotated version. It offers illuminating insights in how a prominent practicing physician and scholar from Norwich reacts to the plague hitting England in Early Modern times and the small help the medical knowledge about the plague from Paracelsus to Browne, which he examines with great learning.
Keywords: Hippocrates, Medicine, Plague, Theory and Practice
***
Abstract:
Among the Henslowe-Alleyn papers donated by Edward Alleyn to Dulwich College in 1619 is a group of letters exchanged in 1593 between the Henslowe household in London, where Alleyn’s young wife Joan then lived, and Edward Alleyn, then touring in the provinces with Lord Strange’s men, when the London theatres were closed on account of the plague. These letters have always been read for the (scanty) contribution they give to the history of Elizabethan theatre. What has not been considered is their pragmatic peculiarity, which illustrates a real, and probably very rare case of collaboration in letter-writing. Joan Alleyn’s literacy was probably either incomplete, or null, and the letters sent to Alleyn were written by Henslowe, who was Joan’s step-father, and who, in turn, ‘received’ Alleyn’s letters to Joan and probably read them to her. The essay first describes the context in which the exchange took place: the 1592-1594 London plague epidemic, the consequent closing of the theatres, and the plague’s impact on the suburb of Southwark where the Henslowes lived; it also outlines the particular social, economic and affective features of the Henslowe family; then it examines the particular pragmatic situation in which the drafting of the letters a young bride addressed to her husband was entrusted to a figure of authority like a father rather than a scribe, a servant, a secretary, or a clerk, that is, the only figures considered by letter-writing theorists as a woman’s ‘extension’ of meanings, or ‘ventriloquist’ substitute. The article also intends to illuminate the figure of Joan Alleyn, née Woodward, her role as subject to her father’s patriarchy in her parents’ house, her management of her own household, and, for many years, the object of her husband’s love and care, when she followed, and was part of Edward Alleyn’s fortune – first as a renowned ‘model actor’ and later as a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Keywords: Henslowe-Alleyn Papers, Joan Alleyn, Letter-Writing Pragmatics, London, Plague
***
Abstract:
Soon after the Black Death reached Italy in the autumn of 1347, the city-states of the quadrilateral instituted Boards of Health dedicated to keeping the disease out, containing its spread and eradicating conditions in which it thrived. Italian practices were later imitated by countries across Europe but not until the early eighteenth century were preventative measures introduced at state level in England. When epidemic struck Provence in 1720, the Whig ministry took powers to impose embargoes, quarantining of ships and cordons sanitaires around infected towns, but was forced to beat a partial retreat by attacks from mercantile interests, by the Country opposition and by anti-contagionists, attacks fuelled by appeals to preserve ‘English Liberties’.It was in this context that Defoe published Due Preparations for the Plague, As Well for Soul as Body. The treatise proposes measures both ‘General’ (to be carried out by governments and magistates, and publicly financed) and ‘Particular’ (organised by individuals and families). Taken together they constitute a series of experiments in avoiding contagion by ‘separating the People as much as possible from one another’. Experimental also with respect to serious plague discourse is Defoe’s intermingling of narrative and dialogue as means of helping readers imagine themselves already under the plague, and motivate them to prepare for an event never experienced. In A Journal of the Plague Year Defoe was to rework his proposals, re-framing and reinterpreting them in a less prescriptive mode and a more collective slant.
Keywords: Defoe, England, Plague, Preparations, 1720s
***
Abstract:
This paper examines the experiences of the plague in early sixteenth-century Italy from the perspective of one Florentine family, the Buonarroti, based on their vast correspondence. The paper explores the way the Buonarroti family members gave voice to their anxieties, particularly with regard to the violent outbreak that swept across Italy in the 1520s. It also examines the advice that family members gave each other, assessing the extent to which this reflected recommendations found in contemporary medical literature. These recommendations most often amounted to fleeing to isolated places, and avoiding contact with individuals and with potentially infected objects. Recommendations about prayers are also found. Comments on the notion of ‘bad’ air are especially frequent, showing that a close association between the concept of contagion and the concept of corrupt air existed not only in medical literature, but even for lay people. The paper underlines the dilemmas the Buonarroti family members (several of whom were wool merchants) faced when it came to choosing between saving their businesses or protecting their health. Finally, it explores writers’ perceptions of social differences, which times of plague might accentuate: their views of servants and of the poor, during outbreaks, were ambivalent, oscillating between compassion and anxiety.
Keywords: Florence, Micro-histories, Plague, Private letters, Renaissance
***
Edward B.M. Rendall, Isabella Rosner, Plays, Plague, and Pouches: The Role of the Outside in Early Modern English Plague Remedies
Abstract:
The article analyses the connection between seventeenth-century English needlework, drama, and plague. Frog pouches – needleworked, perfumed sweet bags used to repel the miasmatic spread of plague – reveal wider attitudes about foreign landscapes in seventeenth-century London and England more generally. This article, then, uses the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and other playwrights and authors of the period, as well as the materials of frog pouches themselves, to explore the exoticism and accessibility of those environments that frogs inhabit. Foreign animals that lived far from English shores, the article argues, thus provided the scents for pouches. The animals that these pouches mimic reveal a reverence for the rural landscape closer to home but just as unknown.
Keywords: Foreignness, Frogs, Needlework, Plague, Theatre
***
Abstract:
The ‘Advice’ drawn up by the College of Physicians for the prevention and cure of the plague was first published in 1578. It was attached to the Orders, a list of directions drawn up by the Privy Council to prevent or limit the spread of the disease. Like the Orders to which it was appended, the ‘Advice’ went through several reprints until 1630, when it had to be rewritten. The 1630 edition of the ‘Advice’ no longer confined itself to medical prescriptions, but included advice about medical provision in the city, the movement of goods and people, and referred to the political measures taken in foreign cities. In this revised, extended version, the ‘Advice’ was reprinted in 1636 and in 1665, when it finally appeared without the preceding Orders. This paper focuses on the pragma-linguistic changes displayed by the 1665 edition as compared with the 1636 edition of the ‘Advice’ in terms of mood and modality (Palmer 1986) and argues that the more mitigated expression of deontic modality and the preference for assertive acts over directive ones (Searle 1985) characterizing the later edition reflect the new editorial and historical context in which the text was produced.
Keywords: Deontic ‘Might’, Diachronic Variation, English Modal Auxiliaries, Historical Pragmatics, Normative/Instructional Discourse
***
Abstract:
From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan’s uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality.
Keywords: Forensic Medicine, Milan, Mortality Registers, Postmortem Diagnosis, Renaissance Italy
***
Abstract:
The article examines Genoese responses to plague during the old regime. Much like the Venetian, the Genoese ruling class understood the nexus between plague, poverty, and famine, and how these, in turn, tied in with political unrest. Some of the Republic’s main political and diplomatic crises were indeed followed by severe outbreaks of plague. Thus, the 1528 plague marked the proclamation of the oligarchic Republic, as a Spanish protectorate, masterminded by Andrea Doria, whereas the 1579-1580 plague closed the civil wars (a struggle of the old patriciate against an alliance of the new patriciate with the popular faction, 1575-1576). While the plague that swept through northern Italy in 1628-1630 narrowly missed Genoa, it became a metaphor with Genoese political thinkers for the narrowly escaped annexation of the Republic by Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy (who died of plague in his encampment, together with scores of the heretics on his payroll). The 1656-1657 epidemic was the most severe in the Genoese old regime, capping an acute political and jurisdictional crisis with Rome and with archbishop Stefano Durazzo. Remarkable documents of this enduring state of conflict are the prayer composed by Paolo Foglietta (poet and brother to Oberto, who was a leader in the civil wars and later a historian of the Republic) invoking an end to the 1579-1580 epidemic, and the anonymous preghiera repubblicana (held at the Vatican Apostolic Archive) which the government of the Republic included in the official religious liturgy in response to a heated jurisdictional crisis with the Holy See (1605-1607). Rome ordered archbishop Orazio Spinola to have the prayer banned, but the ‘Collegi’ of the Republic attempted to have it reinstated following the 1656-1657 plague.
Keywords: Famine, Genoese Republic, Plague, Political Crises, Prayer