A Metaphor for Social Exchange: The Florentine Plague of 1630

Abstract

COMPARED TO THE OTHER GREAT OUTBREAKS of pestilence in seventeenth-century Italy, the Florentine plague of 1630 33 was subdued. It was remarkable more for its gaps, absences, and grey areas than for the choreographic display characteristic of the contemporary epidemic in Milan or of the Naples epidemic in 1656. There was no tumult, there were no executions of suspected carriers of the plague and no recorded instances of collective panic or revolt; the mortality rate was not even particularly high. Relative to the toll taken by the disease in the cities along the Po, the ten thousand deaths occurring during the two outbreaks of the illness (which began in the summer of 1630, disappeared in the first months of 1631, and then flared up again for a short time in spring of 1633) appeared to contemporaries as a kind of blessing.' There were, naturally, all the usual measures of the medical authorities and the police: health inspectors, hierarchies of ad hoc functionaries, the lazarettos, common graves, the boarding up of houses, quarantines. The defensive and offensive means by which the state reorganized urban space and the specific grammar of social responses make a script in some ways similar to that of the other seventeenth-century plagues. But if the background was the same, the scene was different. The political documentation of the epidemic is buried in the official chronicle edited, by order of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II, by Francesco Rondinelli, the grand-ducal librarian.2 This is the principal source on the structure and functioning of the political and medical authorities, the moods of the court, the contributions of the religious orders to assist the stricken, and the conflicts between physicians and magistrates. Like many memoirs written in times of pestilence, Rondinelli's text can be broken into fixed sequences that follow the movement of a double curve: from the apex of health to a rapid descent toward the nadir of illness and death, to the ascent toward the zenith of recovered health. The sick body of the city follows the same parabola as the physiological decline and ascent that marks the bodies of those who survive the plague. The emphasis throughout is on cyclical and natural processes. The disease presents itself again and again at precise intervals, and the return to health is repeated in the same manner. The official script imposes on events an apparently natural reading that is drawn from the very rhythms of the disease and relates the course of the city's history to that of the inevitable trajectory of the illness.