Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson Ann G. Carmichael John Henderson. Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. 382 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-300-19634-4). John Henderson's latest authoritative research on premodern Florentine health offers the "thick description" of microhistory, not "histoire totale," his stated objective. But in a series of topically oriented chapters it is astonishing how much he was able to wrest from boxes of letters to the Florentine Health Office, the criminal records that reflect ordinary citizens' infractions throughout the plague, and the records of confraternities. Surviving documents and the narrative structure adopted by contemporary aristocrats, especially Francesco Rondinelli, become Henderson's guides through a plague inferno. "Through me is the way to the city of woe!" (Inferno, canto III, l.1) Henderson's narrative, following Rondinelli, begins with new cases of plague at Trespiano, a border town on the thoroughfare leading into the Florentine duchy from Bologna; the plague account ends fairly abruptly (as did Dante, "And we came out again and saw the stars"; canto XXXIV, l. 139), without offering conventional historical summary or reflection. We readers know that a purgatory will follow, that Florence would not again experience a great plague. But contemporaries did not know this, and by ending at the brief return of plague in 1633, Henderson reinforces the sense of a suspended moment in which survivors still bent under the weight of the calamity. Florentines' outpouring of ex voto offerings and newly commissioned art to cover the walls of most Florentine churches allows Henderson to make their burdens real and visible to us. In a particularly lugubrious aside Henderson suggests that the plague years had provided Church authorities the opportunity to clear out [End Page 524] older deposits that had begun to compromise the physical structures of some votive churches, readying them to receive the new lot. It is difficult in a short review to summarize how brilliantly Henderson populates all the circles and pits of this human misery. At the same time, he uses nuance and detail to smudge the edges of any firm argument or assessment possible with historical distance. Why did Florentine authorities not make preparations before events at the border? They knew that plague had raged all around north and central Italy for well over a year. Why did they think a seventy-four-bed city facility would be lazaretto enough? Henderson ventures that the last time Florence suffered a significant plague was the 1520s. Did they thus think they would escape this one? We have evidence, not conclusions, on these and many other points. Once cases appeared in the city the health administrators believed they could use stenches to identify plague hotspots and to justify removal of any poorer person with a "whiff" of plague to newly designated hillside isolation areas. The aristocrats managing the plague clearly believed they could expel plague by sending its victims to an array of bubo-like isolation structures, some for the ill, some for household contacts or "suspects," some for convalescents. Letters from directors of these facilities offer particularly powerful images of the catastrophe unfolding. Within the fortress of San Miniato, new arrivals overwhelmed staff and led to soaring mortality. Henderson deftly adds to an already wrenching description that a later inventory confirms the use of paper and oilcloth as window coverings in the main church, opened to draw fetid air out of the nave. Henderson's instinct is to constrain his own historical gaze, wresting all that he can from contemporary documentation and artistic production. Otherwise we tend not to hear about the totality of plague, where the city sources are silent. Plague was not only seeping into northern Tuscany from both Bologna and Mantua; it also affected all towns, large and small, in Florence's hinterlands. While he does not avoid comparisons and historiographical issues—for example, cities that invested in permanent lazarettos versus those that did not, the gradual transformation of the late medieval poor into an early modern proletariat—he sidesteps any use of his evidence to resolve modern debates. When using a...