God’s Invisible Particles as an Explanation for the Rinderpest Outbreak (1713–1714): The Reception of Medical Knowledge in the Dutch Republic

Abstract

Abstract In recent decades, historians have made significant contributions to the understanding of the production and circulation of knowledge in the early modern period. This article aims to go further, by demonstrating how a non-medical expert acquired and applied new medical knowledge, and how chronicles can be used as a source to study the reception of (medical) knowledge in the early modern period. To do this, I have used the corpus of the research project Chronicling Novelty which contains 311 early modern chronicles from the Low Countries, written by a heterogenous group of authors from the ‘middling’ ranks of society. The farmer and alderman Lambert Rijckxz Lustigh (1656–1727) tried to make sense of the rinderpest outbreak that spread across the Low Countries in 1713. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, he combined a corpuscular theory of medicine with other forms of knowledge to demonstrate how God’s ‘invisible particles’ caused an epidemic. This paper presents how expert knowledge became part of a complex chain of cultural translation and retranslation in society. Moreover, by examining Lustigh’s explanations in relation to his contemporaries and other chroniclers, this paper offers an additional perspective on the preconditions for the acceptance of new knowledge and change among the middling ranks of society.