Samuel K. Cohn

Epidemiology of the Black Death and successive waves of plague.

Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of ad 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: “none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it”, and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands.1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until ad 750, if not longer.2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815,3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and Russia. Its cycles, however, lengthened from a hit about every ten years for any locale during the latter half of the fourteenth century to absences of 120 years or more for major cities at least in Italy by the seventeenth century. Despite repeated claims in textbooks, the plague of Marseilles in 1720–1 was not this pandemics European finale.4 In 1743, 48,000 perished from plague in Messina; in 1770–1 over 100,000 in Moscow; and in the Balkans, Egypt, Asia Minor and Russia this Black-Death-type of contagious plague may have persisted as late as 1879.5

After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes Towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe

The Black Death spurred monarchies and city‐states across much of Western Europe to formulate new wage and price legislation. These legislative acts splintered in a multitude of directions that to date defy any obvious patterns of economic or political rationality. A comparison of labour laws in England, France, Provence, Aragon, Castile, the Low Countries, and the city‐states of Italy shows that these laws did not flow logically from new post‐plague demographics and economics—the realities of the supply and demand for labour. Instead, the new municipal and royal efforts to control labour and artisans’ prices emerged from fears of the greed and supposed new powers of subaltern classes and are better understood in the contexts of anxiety that sprung forth from the Black Death’s new horrors of mass mortality and destruction, resulting in social behaviour such as the flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans, and beggars.

Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy

The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonantola during the plague of 1630 allow historians to reconstitute the patterns of family and household deaths caused by pestilence. Not only did deaths caused by this highly contagious disease cluster tightly within households; the intervals between household deaths were also extremely short. As much as one-quarter of all plague deaths were multiple household deaths that occurred on the same day. Similar to a deadly influenza, the speed and efficiency with which the late medieval and early modern plagues spread depended on unusually short periods of incubation and infectivity.

Historical Parallels, Ebola Virus Disease and Cholera: Understanding Community Distrust and Social Violence with Epidemics.

In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, resistance to public health measures contributed to the startling speed and persistence of this epidemic in the region. But how do we explain this resistance, and how have people in these communities understood their actions? By comparing these recent events to historical precedents during Cholera outbreaks in Europe in the 19th century we show that these events have not been new to history or unique to Africa. Community resistance must be analysed in context and go beyond simple single-variable determinants. Knowledge and respect of the cultures and beliefs of the afflicted is essential for dealing with threatening disease outbreaks and their potential social violence.

Renaissance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Testaments

Over the past decade ‘material culture’ has become a sub�?discipline of Italian Renaissance studies. This literature, however, has focused on the rich and their objects preserved in museums or reflected in paintings. In addition, the period 1300 to 1600 has been treated without attention to changes in the relationship between people and possessions. The article turns to last wills and testaments, which survive in great numbers and sink deep roots through late medieval and Renaissance cities and their hinterlands. They reveal aspirations and anxieties about things from post�?mortem repairs to farm houses to pillows of monks wool. These aspirations changed fundamentally after the Black Death. Earlier, during the ‘commercial revolution’, ordinary merchants, artisans, and peasants on their deathbeds practised what the mendicants preached: stripping themselves of their possessions, they converted their estates to coin to be scattered among pious and non�?pious beneficiaries. After the Black Death, testators began to reverse tack, devising ever more complex legal strategies to govern the future flow of their goods. This work of the dead had larger economic consequences. By encouraging the liquidation of estates, the earlier mendicant ideology quickened the velocity of exchange, while the early Renaissance attachment to things did the opposite.

Nonantola 1630. Anatomia di una pestilenza e meccanismi del contagio (con riflessioni a partire dalle epidemie milanesi della prima Età moderna)

Nonantola 1630. Anatomia di una pestilenza e meccanismi del contagio (con riflessioni a partire dalle epidemie milanesi della prima Eta moderna) Nel mondo anglosassone, l’identificazione dell’agente causale delle epidemie di peste che colpirono l’Europa tra la fine del Medioevo e l’Eta moderna, comunemente individuato nel bacillo della Yersinia pestis , continua ad essere oggetto di un acceso dibattito. Non mancano, infatti, ne proposte di identificazione alternative, ne perplessita generate dalla discrepanza tra i dati disponibili per le pestilenze del passato e il comportamento delle epidemie di Yersinia pestis del XX secolo. A tale dibattito, i demografi e gli storici continentali hanno preso parte solo molto sporadicamente. Scopo di questo saggio e analizzare le modalita di trasmissione della malattia, avvalendosi di nuovi dati e di ampie ricostruzioni nominative e micro-demografiche, ed accettando metodologicamente la possibilita che la peste del passato (la ‘peste storica’) abbia caratteristiche diverse rispetto alla malattia che colpi l’India e la Cina alla fine del XIX secolo. A partire dall’analisi del caso di Nonantola durante la terribile epidemia del 1630, ed avvalendosi di una ricostruzione della struttura abitativa (per fuochi e per porzioni dell’abitato) incrociata con dati tratti dai registri parrocchiali delle sepolture, le caratteristiche biodemografiche della peste storica vengono analizzate nel dettaglio. Si argomenta, inoltre, che i dati disponibili suggeriscono che il contagio avvenisse da uomo a uomo. Dati relativi a sei epidemie occorse a Milano tra 1452 e 1523 vengono utilizzati quale termine di confronto e verifica delle ipotesi avanzate. Da ultimo, il saggio si propone di collocare i risultati raggiunti in merito alla trasmissione della peste storica nel quadro del dibattito relativo all’identificazione di marker genetici di Yersinia Pestis nei cimiteri della peste medioevali e moderni, sottolineando come, anche qualora venisse confermata, tale identificazione non escluderebbe automaticamente l’ipotesi che peste storica e peste contemporanea siano causate da diverse biovarianti dello stesso agente patogeno capaci di dare origine a fenomeni epidemici assai diversi: cosi diversi, forse, da permettere di argomentare che peste storica e peste contemporanea vadano considerate malattie differenti. Nonantola 1630. Anatomy of a plague and the mechanisms of contagion (with reflection from the plague experience in Early Modern Milan) In the English-speaking world, the question of whether Yersinia pestis was the pathogen of the plagues that swept through Europe from 1347 to the end of the early modern period continues to stir debate. Alternative pathogens have been proposed and discrepancies shown between the epi- demiology of these earlier plagues and that of the rodent-based twentieth-century plague ( Yersinia pestis ). Yet, until now, continental European demographers and historians have taken little part in these discussions. In this essay, the authors analyse the transmission of plagues in Italy’s early modern past (‘historical plague’), presenting new data for new demographic analysis. We have been open to the possibility that historical plague may not have been the same disease that struck India and China at the end of the nineteenth century. We begin with the case of Nonantola during the terrible epidemic of 1630, reconstructing its household structure (by hearth composition and position of households in the town). With parish burial registers, we analyze in detail various bio-demographic characteristics of the plague. Through these methods we find that the disease was seemingly highly contagious, person to person. The same is shown with six plague epidemics in Milan from 1452 to 1523. Finally, we place our results concerning the plague’s transmission during the early modern period within recent debates raised by new hypotheses concerning the identification of ancient-DNA found in teeth from medieval and early modern graves. Even if these results will someday be confirmed, they do not exclude the possibilities that the strains of the pathogens could differ significantly with vastly different epidemiological consequences, so different, in fact, as to argue that the diseases of the two plague waves were not the same.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture

Combining aspects of recent scholarship in history and anthropology, this book explores how ‘Survivals and Renewals’ can be used as tools for understanding the society of Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy. This collection of fifteen studies brings together scholars of late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Italy to reflect on the multifaceted world of ritual. The scope is expansive, covering four centuries, and the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. Because of older presumptions about the modernity of the Renaissance and hence its supposed aversion to the irrational, scholarship on ritual life in Italian city-states of the Renaissance has lagged behind the historiography on symbols and rituals in monarchies north of the Alps. Only by the 1990s had a wide range of scholars across disciplines become interested in these subjects and approaches for the late medieval and early modern Italian city-state; yet no synthesis or comparative work on rituals and symbols has peered across the regional enclaves of Italy. Through original research in libraries and archives across the Italian peninsula, these essays analyze the richness and importance of ritual at the heart of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation states, the importance of oaths, ritual space, the power of images, processions, curses, guild ceremonies, saints, and more. The wide geographic and disciplinary range of these essays provides a new platform for viewing the significance of ritual and symbolic power in Renaissance and early modern Italy.

Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

Acknowledgments Introduction Notes to the reader Maps 1. Before the Black Death, 1245 to 1348 2. From the Black Death to 1378 3. The Jacquerie 4. The Revolt of the Ciompi, 1378-1382 5. The cluster north of the Alps, 1378-82 Epilogue: After the cluster, 1382 to 1423 Suggested readings

Fear and the corpse: cholera and plague riots compared

Ever since Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s lectures on ancient history in 1816, scholars have depicted epidemics as giving rise to hate, violence, and the stigmatization of the ‘other’. Acts of charity, the sacrifices of individuals and communities, and forces of unity have thus been largely overlooked. More disturbing has been scholars’ failure to analyze reactions to epidemics historically and their failure to consider the fact that different diseases might affect societal reactions differently just as different diseases affect our bodies differently. Rene Baehrel’s classic article of 1952, for example, proclaimed that the tendencies of big epidemics to arouse hatred are ingrained in our ‘mental structures’, and are ‘psychological constants’. This essay will compare two diseases of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cholera and plague. Both led to mass violence and riots involving upwards of 20,000 people. Both drew sharp class differences. Both led to conspiracies and myths of physicians and the state intentionally poisoning wells and food to kill off the poor. Rioters in both attacked hospitals, doctors, nurses, and government officials. As with Ebola in West Africa in 2014, the provocation of violence and hatred often stemmed from clashes over burial practices and violations to corpses, imagined and real. These clashes of cultures occurred not only between colonial soldiers and worshippers in poor districts of Calcutta or Bombay; they also divided communities and led to cholera riots in New York City, Liverpool, London, Glasgow, Dublin, Hamburg, Budapest, Naples, Verbicaro, Taranto, Tashkent, and many other cities, towns, and villages in Europe with different religious beliefs and customs between 1831 and 1911. Behind these similarities in reactions to plague and cholera were, however, profound differences regarding the organization and composition of crowds, the targets of opposition, and, above all, ideologies and politics. This chapter will explore these divergences.

Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like

Abstract Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asiatic Russia to Quebec or across time from the first European cholera wave of the 1830s to the twentieth century. Scholars have instead concentrated on the first European cholera wave in the 1830s and have tended to explain cholera’s social violence within the political contexts of individual nations, despite these riots raging across vast differences in political landscapes from Czarist Russia to New York City but with similar fears and conspiracy theories of elites inventing cholera to cull populations of the poor. Moreover, the history of cholera’s social toxins runs against present generalizations on why epidemics spawn blame and violence against others. Cholera riots continued, and in Italy and Russia became geographically more widespread, vicious, and destructive long after the disease had lost its mystery. The article then poses the question of why historians on the left have not studied the class struggles provoked by cholera, with riots of 10,000, murdering state officials and doctors, destroying hospitals, town halls, and in the case of Donetsk, an entire city. Finally, the article draws parallels between Europe’s cholera experiences and those in West Africa with Ebola in 2014.