2. Pandemics and epidemics

‘Pandemics and epidemics’ starts by looking at the conventional picture of the history of plague which divides it into three long pandemics, each of them made up of a series of separate but closely connected epidemics, in particular places, extending over centuries. The ‘Plague of Justinian’, the ‘Black Death’, and the epidemics in India and China in the late 1800s are useful case studies. How do plagues appear and disappear? The European defences against plague in the early modern period included quarantine precautions. Quarantine created protective thresholds which reduced the risk of plague retaining its hold across the whole European mainland.

4. Private horrors

‘Private horrors’ details the experiences of plague, looking at narrative sources illustrating how people coped. There were always two stories to tell about plague. One is about heroes undeterred by contagion, the other about victims of harsh officialdom and of quarantine measures. The fullest accounts tried to combine the two and show men and women, physicians, churchmen, magistrates, and citizens trying to cooperate in impossible circumstances. Most poignant of all are expressions of the pain and loss created by one of plague’s cruellest features: the heavy mortality it inflicted on single families and households, as relatives and servants died one after the other.

3. Big impacts

‘Big impacts’ focuses on the Black Death, which had an impact on every sphere of human activity. Indeed, the Black Death reshaped the course of European history. The case is strongest in the area where sudden, severe, and prolonged high mortality might be expected to have an effect—that of economic and social relations. The Black Death also had an impact on how people thought about their world and their place in it, and some have argued that there were wholesale changes in mentalities, amounting to turning points in contemporary culture. It is interesting to note that the process of accommodating plague took less time than one might imagine.

6. Enduring images

‘Enduring images’ describes the various images which have been attached to plague. These include graphic metaphors, like the arrows of Apollo and the swords of biblical angels, which symbolize its causes; and literary conventions, such as those of Thucydides and Boccaccio about the disruption of families and societies, which summarize its consequences. Over time, new icons have been added to them, such as plague-saints and plague-doctors, and metaphors were borrowed from other contexts, like the Dance of Death and visions of the Apocalypse. Taken together, they determined how plague was imagined in the past. Ultimately, images of plague have a continuous history, invented and then elaborated over the centuries.

5. Public health

‘Public health’ addresses plague policies and the notions of public health they embodied. The particular character of plague epidemics undoubtedly made its own contribution to the ways in which it was combated. It evidently came from outside, and its chief victims were the poor and disadvantaged—people with little political influence who seemed in need of control for other reasons. Surveillance and segregation followed naturally from that. Once begun, however, they appeared wherever rulers and regimes wanted to exercise greater control over their subjects. The reason why Europe was first in developing a particularly draconian code of public health seems likely to lie, therefore, in the realm of politics.

1. Plague

‘Plague’ discusses the identity of plague. The word ‘plague’ has been used over the centuries to denote an epidemic disease of particular severity and dramatic impact, and a disease which probably always had the same causative agent, now known to have been a bacillus, Yersinia pestis. Today, plague is certainly much better understood than it has ever been. The findings of modern medical science about plague’s causes (aetiology) and its incidence and distribution (epidemiology) have illuminated many aspects of its history. However, they have given rise to considerable debate about whether all the plagues of the past can have had the same cause as those of the present.

7. The lessons of histories

‘The lesson of histories’ explores the lessons from histories of plague. These lessons highlight the importance of cultures and institutions, contexts and agents in creating epidemics and reactions to them. They show that the ways in which people think and live, the kinds of information available to them, and the kinds of behaviour they adopt make a difference. Whether they were effective or not, the quarantine policies invented and developed in early modern Europe demonstrated the role played by political cultures and political institutions in shaping reactions to plague. The responses to new or ‘re-emerging’ diseases, which seemed to threaten fresh pandemic disasters, including HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, have shown that public and private responses to them will be necessary, diverse, and divisive, and no more certain to succeed than they were in the past.