Parishes, Pandemics and Paths to Take: Post-Covid-19 Historical Options

Abstract

This article asks how Covid-19 should affect historical research, especially into local and parish history. It does so by addressing a number of key themes, such as the conduct of welfare history, and how Covid might influence historical medical research and ideas of locality. The effects of Covid on religion and the parish are examined, with an eye to historical precedent. The pandemic raises salient issues about the history of community and loneliness, discussed here. Covid, it is argued, has accentuated personal isolation and loneliness in society, highlighting many points and sources of historical comparison. It prompts important questions about historical sociability and human isolation. It has raised issues of local xenophobia and related emotions that have many echoes in our past. One needs to ask how far its restrictions on movement and issues of vaccine documentation were historically precedented. The article outlines these and related matters as an re-directive agenda for Covid-influenced research into parish and community history.