From „black plague” to „red plague”: meanings, symbols and impact (historical, literary, medical, imagological and ethnocultural)

The „Black Plague” pandemic (1347–1351) was a biological and epidemiological phenomenon. The term „red plague” was first used by F. Reinhardt in his work „Die Rote Pest” (1930). The „Red Plague” is a plague of Bolshevik / communist ideological, political and military fanaticism, installed in October 1917 in Russia and later spread to several countries. The origin of these two plagues is totally different; at the same time, there are multiple affinities of imagological, symbolic, ethnological, demographic, demonological and semiotic type between them. The medieval plague appeared simultaneously with Death, Hunger and War, respectively, the communist regimes, associated with the „red plague”, are guilty of mass extermination of tens and even hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The “red plague” has far outweighed its disastrous impact on any plague or pandemic in human history.

SMALLPOX PLAGUE IN COLONIAL BRAZIL Historical tragedy or genocide?

This article studies the impact the16th century smallpox pandemic had on the indigenous population of the Brazilian coast. It offers a comparison between the spread of smallpox in colonial America and the European Black Plague in the Late Middle Ages. It discusses the smallpox pandemic in the context of Iberian colonization, especially the Portuguese one. It analyzes the hypothesis of the African origin of the strain of smallpox spread in Brazil. It also examines quantitative evidence on native mortality, relating it to the procedures adopted in the Jesuit villages. Finally, it evaluates the relevance of concepts such as Genocide or Necropolitics for the studies on the smallpox pandemic in the 16th century.

Calamitas terrena ou Poena divina : Une approche éliadienne de la peste dans le roman Sortez vos morts de Bruno Leydet

"Calamitas terrena or Poena divina: An Eliadian Approach to the Plague in the Novel Sortez vos morts by Bruno Leydet. The article proposes a dichotomous analysis of the outbreak of the Black Plague in Marseille (1720), described by French writer Bruno Leydet in the novel Sortez vos morts, which appeared in 2005. According to the grid established by Mircea Eliade, the analysis is built on two levels: the sacred and the profane. The religious as well as the modern perception of the disease and the use of a relevant lexis allow the bubonic plague to transgress the historical space, passing into the literary one. The plague epidemic in southern France is, in our view, not only a manifestation of the divine will to punish the sinful souls of the dead, but also the incarnation of greed and vicious side of the human being. Keywords: plague, Bruno Leydet, Mircea Eliade, holy, unholy "

Examining Our Past Relationship with Climate to Understand Climate’s Current Importance: An Exploration of Climate Change During the Little Ice Age

From the years 1300 until the 1850’s people living in Western Europe battled a terrifying and seemingly insurmountable foe, the Little Ice Age. Examining how people of this time not only survived but thrived during an era of cataclysmic climate change can offer us positive perspectives and productive mechanisms going forward in our own battle with climate in modern times. Explored are massive famines and epidemic disease, volcanic eruptions and their after-effects, specific historical events such as the Black Plague and the Irish Potato famine and how all of these devastating events overlap to create a vivid picture of human fortitude. This article uncovers the tools and ingenuity Western Europeans employed to overcome a rapidly changing climate and how those tools are properly utilized to battle devastating climatic events. In exploring both scientific theory, including anthropological works such as Anthony Wallace’s Revitalization Movement, and the modern church’s position on climate change, this article hopes to address the current circumstance of global climate change and provide a potential way forward for modern humans in light of scientific reason and theological discussion about our unavoidable role in the environment.

Novels Speak Reality: Ivanhoe, An Example

Stories have been the source of moral lessons and entertainment, as far as the humankind of all the time, is concerned. The use of story- telling existed from the time immemorial. Stories appeared in the form of ballads and epics, in the ancient time, but later it took the shape of short and long fictions. The long fictions or novels varied in its theme and size. They are divided into many genres according to its subject matter- Gothic, Picaresque, Historical etc. The Ballad is nothing but a short story in verse. Its subjects are simple and memorable like adventure, love, war and the life etc. An Epic is a long tale in verse with famous heroes for its main characters. Iliad and Odyssey are examples. These stories gave the reader enjoyment and certain life-related ‘tips’. Hayden White, an American historian says, “the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of the history”. Historians and Novelists wish to provide a verbal image of ‘reality’. A novelist may produce reality indirectly but this is meant to correspond to some sphere of human experience. He desires to pass the merits and demerits of such experience onto the readers, to enhance a better vision of life. Novelists are free to use fictitious characters and situations for the readers’ entertainment. Stories took its present prose form later in the middle ages. Decameron, a collection of stories by Boccaccio, was published in 1350. It deals with stories told by a group of people affected by Black Plague. They used these stories to get mental relief from the pandemic. ‘Canterbury Tales’ of Geoffrey Chaucer also, is telling the life-related stories by some pilgrims to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. All these show that men were, from the early ages itself, used to tell stories to recollect the past and go forward with lessons of reality for a better life. Actually these stories are ‘historical facts’ blended with the imagination of the writers.

David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book <?page nr="470"?>is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine:

When History and Genetics Tell Different Stories,

Biologist Shai Carmi et al. demonstrated several years ago (in Nature Communications) that the entire contemporary community of Ashkenazic Jews, numbering very roughly ten million individuals, can trace its ancestry to an effective population of about 350 persons living in Poland at the midpoint of the Fourteenth Century. Historians have been slow to examine the powerful and deeply troubling implications of Carmi’s work, which invites exploration of how a once extensive population of Jews in the Roman Empire could have been almost completely extinguished during the Medieval era. This paper examines several possible historical hypotheses that have been put forth to explain Carmi’s so-far uncontested scientific finding, and concludes that the most powerful contributor to the decimation of the root population in the Roman Empire was likely to have been religious-inspired violence taking place during the lengthy period of the Crusades and immediately after the Black Plague epidemic.