1st Edition
Plague in the Early Modern World A Documentary History
Plague in the Early Modern World presents a broad range of primary source materials from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, China, India, and North America that explore the nature and impact of plague and disease in the early modern world.
During the early modern period frequent and recurring outbreaks of plague and other epidemics around the world helped to define local identities and they simultaneously forged and subverted social structures, recalibrated demographic patterns, dictated political agendas, and drew upon and tested religious and scientific worldviews. By gathering texts from diverse and often obscure publications and from areas of the globe not commonly studied, Plague in the Early Modern World provides new information and a unique platform for exploring early modern world history from local and global perspectives and examining how early modern people understood and responded to plague at times of distress and normalcy.
Including source materials such as memoirs and autobiographies, letters, histories, and literature, as well as demographic statistics, legislation, medical treatises and popular remedies, religious writings, material culture, and the visual arts, the volume will be of great use to students and general readers interested in early modern history and the history of disease.
Introduction
Modern medicine and conditions
Vulnerability and resilience: conceptual categories and interpretive framework
1: The bubonic plague: historical overview and scope
Terminology
Defining early modern plague
Recurrence of plague
Global dimensions
Plague and other disease epidemics
Sources
1.1 Plague in the Ottoman capital: a diplomatic perspective
Author: Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–92)
Title: The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople 1554–1562
1.2 A visitor’s perspective on plague
Author: Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz
Title: Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz…
1.3 Plague in early modern Hindustan
Author: Jahangir, Emperor of Hindustan (1569–1627)
Title: The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri; or, Memoirs of Jahangir
1.4 Plague statistics in Frankfurt am Main (1622–40)
1.5 Episodes from the plague in Rome of 1656. Etching
1.6 Plague death tolls in the early seventeenth century
Author: Richard Bradley, F. R. S. (1688–1732)
Title: The Plague at Marseilles Considered…
1.7 Plague and other diseases in eighteenth-century Aleppo
Author: Alexander Russell (c 1715–68)
Title: Natural History of Aleppo
1.8 Plague in Russia
Author: Charles Mertens (1737–88)
Title: An Account of the Plague which Raged at Moscow in 1771
1.9 A major plague episode in China in 1770/71
1.10 Observing plague in early modern Africa
Author: Johannes Leo Africanus (c 1494–c 1554)
Title: The History and Description of Africa of Leo Africanus
1.11 Epidemic disease in early modern North America
Author: Noah Webster (1758–1843)
Title: A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases
2: Religious understanding of and response to plague
Textual foundations
Late medieval religious orientations
Saints, relics, and processions
Flight from plague
Sources
2.1 Prayer as a weapon against the plague
Author: Ismail ibn Kathīr (b c 1300–73)
Title: The Beginning and End: On History (c 1350–51)
2.2 Competition in the religious economy
Author: Michele da Piazza
Title: Chronicle (1347–61)
2.3 Islamic religious responses to plague: fasting and sacrifice
Author: Ibn Taghrī Birdī
Title: History of Egypt 1382–1469 CE
2.4 Seeking saintly intercession: the case of Saint Roche
2.4A: Devotion to Saint Roche
Author: Jehan Phelipot
Title: The Life, Legend, Miracles of Saint Roch (1494)
2.4B: Saintly intercession
2.4C: Saint Roch in church
2.5 God punishes Egypt with the sixth plague, the plague of boils
2.6 Fleeing from the plague
Author: Martin Luther (1483–1546)
Title: "Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague" (1527)
2.7 Clergy and the plague: intercession and activity
Author: Nicolau Gracida
Title: "Letter to Manuel Lopez" (1538)
2.8 Supplications to God to end the plague
Author: Selaniki Mustafa Efendi (d 1600)
Title: Chronicle of Salonika [Tarih-i-Selaniki]
2.9 Prayer to avert the plague
Title: "Prayer for a Time in Which There Is No Plague Arriving"
2.10 Procession as a response to plague
Artist: Jean Solvain (1600–64)
Title: "The Vow of the Plague, Procession, April 22, 1630"
2.11 Religious approaches to illness
Author: Heinrich Grasmüller (b c 1630)
Title: Sickness-Book, or Prayers and Adages of Consolation for the Sick and Dying (Hamburg, 1681)
2.12 Monument to the plague
Erasmus Siegmund Alkofer, Regensburg Plague- and Penance-Monument on Account of the Plague and Pestilence Raging Widely in the Year of Christ 1713 (1714)
2.13 A memorial of plague in the eighteenth century: religious understandings
Author: Erasmus Siegmund Alkofer (1673–1727)
Title: Regensburg Pestilence- and Penance Memorial on the Occasion of the Plague and Pestilence Raging Widely in the Year of Christ 1713
2.14 Religious responses to other disease epidemics
Author: Jonathan Belcher
Title: "A Proclamation for a Public Fast"
2.15 Early modern saints
Artist: Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (1714–89)
Title: "St. Charles Borromeo Distributing Communion to the Victims of the Plague in Milan" (c 1760)
3: Medical understanding of and responses to plague
Early modern conceptions of plague
The spread of plague: contagion and miasma
Early modern experiences
Scientific traditions and underpinnings
Plague: between science and religion
Sources
3.1 Applying wound dressings, scarification with cupping glasses
Title: Treatise on the Plague (Tractatabus de Pestilentia) (fifteenth century)
3.2 Tradition and innovation in early modern medicine
Author: Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1478–1553)
Title: On Contagion and Contagious Diseases and Their Cures (1546)
3.3 Plague precautions
Author: Francois Valleriole (1504–80)
Title: Tractate on the Plague (1566)
3.4 Confronting the ancients
Author: Wu Youxing (c 1580–1660)
Title: Treatise on Acute Epidemic Warmth [Wenyilun] (1642)
3.5 The plague (1649): Hospital del Pozo Santo, Spain
Anonymous, Seville, Spain (seventeenth century)
3.6 Classifications of plague
Author: M. Chicoyneau, Verney, and Soullier
Title: "A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles: Its Symptoms, and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It" (1721)
3.7 Dietary considerations in preventing plague
Title: Medicina Flagellata (1721)
3.8 Protective clothing
Author: Jean-Jacques Manget (1652–1742)
Title: Treatise on the Plague (Geneva, 1721)
3.9 Cattle plague
Author: Richard Bradley, F. R. S. (1688–1732)
Title: The Plague at Marseilles Considered (1721)
3.10 Comparing diseases and treatment
Author: Richard Mead (1673–1754)
Title: A Discourse on the Plague (1744)
4: Political and policy responses to plague
Governmental actions: quarantines, lazarettos, hospitals
The question of sanitation in civic ordinances
Religious dimensions of political responses to plague
Sources
4.1 Civic examinations
Title: "The Plague Orders of 1541," Venice
4.2 Running a plague house
Author: Paul Hector Mair (1517–79)
Title: Chronicle from 1547–1565
4.3 The ideal plague hospital
Author: Francois Valleriole (1504–80)
Title: Trafficking of the Plague (1566)
4.4 Tales of the lazaretto
Author: Rocco Benedetti (active 1556–82)
Title: "Account of the Plague of 1575–1577" (1630, Bologna; originally published in 1577 in Urbino)
4.5 A Window onto early modern Jewish life
Title: "Prague Plague Ordinance" (1607)
4.6 Practical policies and approaches to the plague
Author: Abraham Catalano (d. 1642)
Title: "A World Turned Upside-Down"
4.7 London plague ordinances (1665)
Author: Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
Title: Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
4.8 The lazaretto and medical services to the community
Author: Jacob ben Isaac Zahalon (1630–93)
Title: "The Treasure of Life" (1683)
4.9 An eighteenth-century epidemic in Western Europe
Artist: Etching by J. Rigaud after M. Serre
Title: "The Port of Marseille during the Plague of 1720" (1720)
5: Social responses to plague: memory, society, and culture
Impact on daily life
Marginalization: plague as polemical tool and boundary marker
Marginal and liminal segments of society: the poor, foreigners, and Jews
Cultural responses to plague
Sources
5.1 Judicial protection of Jews—theory
Author: Pope Clement VI (1291–1352, r. 1342–52)
Title: "Sicut Judeis" (Mandate to Protect the Jews) (October 1, 1348)
5.2 Communal responses and social implications of the plague
Author: Ahmad ibn ‘Alī al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442)
Title: A History of the Ayyubids and Mamluks (fifteenth century)
5.3 Finance magistrate’s book cover
Anonymous, Siena, Italy, 1437
"Allegory of the Plague"
5.4 Exegesis and plague
Author: Martin Luther (1483–1546)
Title: "First Lectures on the Psalms" (1513–15)
5.5 Jewish suffering in the exile
Author: Samuel Usque (c. 1500–after 1555)
Title: Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (Ferrara, 1553)
5.6 Heresy, more pernicious than plague
Author: Jan David (c. 1545–1613)
Title: Christian Soothsayer … (1603)
5.7 Engraving of the torture and execution of alleged plague carriers
Title: Description of the Implementation of Justice Made in Milan against Some of Them Who Have Made Up and Spread the Anointed Pestiferous … (Milan, 1630)
5.8 Imagined power?
Author: Joseph Juspa Hahn of Nördlingen (1570–1637)
Title: Maaseh Nissim (early seventeenth century)
5.9 Intra communal relations
Author: Anonymous
Title: "Autobiography" (seventeenth century)
5.10 Plague and public space
Artist: Carlo Coppola (d. c.1672)
Title: "Plague Scene in Market Square" (Naples, Italy, 1656) (detail)
5.11 Family, community, and politics
Author: Glückel (Glikl bas Judah Leib) of Hameln (1646–1724)
Title: Memoirs (before 1720)
5.12 Literary constructions of plague
Author: Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
Title: Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
5.12A Plague and the common man
5.12B Escaping quarantine
5.12C Family abandonment
Bibliography
Works cited
Further reading
Biography
Dean Phillip Bell is President/CEO and Professor of Jewish History at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. His publications include Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany, Jews in the Early Modern World, and Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Identity. He is also editor of The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography.
