Revisiting the Plague in the Age of Galileo

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Previous articleNext article FreeRevisiting the Plague in the Age of GalileoHannah MarcusHannah MarcusHarvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the midst of the epidemic and in flagrant defiance of public health decrees, armed men, women, and children from several rural towns gathered with a priest to worship in their church. These events could have taken place almost anywhere in the United States in the spring of 2020, as I wrote this essay, but I drew this particular account from Carlo Cipolla’s description of the 1630–1633 outbreak of plague in the village of Montelupo, a fortressed town in the Tuscan hills less than twenty miles east of Florence. The collision of the past I study and the present I am living has been resounding.1Rereading Cipolla’s classic accounts of plague and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, I am struck by the repetition of plots and characters across the volumes. There are differences across these texts, and from these different emphases we can trace Cipolla’s evolving interest in economics, charity, religion, and public health.2 But structurally the books all follow the same formula, tracing the events of the 1630 plague epidemic in small cities and towns in the Tuscan countryside. The heroes, in Cipolla’s eyes, are beleaguered bureaucrats, working to enforce public health measures—such as quarantines, curfews, and the removal of relatives to lazarettos—that no one in the civilian population ever seems to want. The main characters in Cipolla’s books—Cristofano, Father Dragoni, and Signor Vettori—face a range of challenges particular to their communities, but the three men are cut from the same cloth—or, rather, drawn from the same archival material: account books, letters to magistrates, and public health decrees.The people Cipolla’s heroes are set on controlling—or on saving, depending on one’s perspective—also respond in ways that are similar both across his texts and even into our own moment. Whether from Prato, Montelupo, or Pistoia, when faced with plague and the measures to try to control it these citizens, the vast majority of whom lived hand to mouth, invariably became angry and hungry. They shot public officials in the streets, stoned their carriages, and berated them. They resisted well-intentioned public health measures in ways that for many of Cipolla’s readers before this year (myself included) must have seemed distant. Amid our current pandemic, Cipolla’s accounts of villagers forging health passes, tearing down the stockades barricading town entrances, and sneaking prostitutes into pesthouses all take on a more sinister tone—it seems that no amount of regulation has ever been able to curb individual self-interest. From our current perspective, though, we can also frame new readings of some of Cipolla’s colorful examples. The verbal abuse that the Montelupans hurled at their mayor, Francesco della Stufa, calling him a “despicable cuckold,” sounds like a particular kind of crude civic comedy read through the lens of montages of today’s Italian mayors, who, to the delight and consternation of many internet viewers, performed exasperated fury and creative cursing to convince their citizens to stay home.Cipolla was an economic historian drawn to the data, cycles, and characters that emerged from early modern public health records.3 These books are page-turners, though when read in succession their repetitiveness is striking. Indeed, this underlying repetition raises one of the thorniest issues in the study of epidemics: To what degree are all outbreaks of contagious disease similar? Certainly, there is an episodic and repetitive nature to epidemics, which tend to follow a common formula.4 To make sense of epidemics past and present, we must bridge the levels of structural similarity and the particularity of individual cases. Rereading Giulia Calvi’s Histories of a Plague Year alongside Cipolla’s accounts allows us to do just that. Methodologically, one of the great insights of Italian microhistory has been that careful attention to deviance from social patterns can reveal the incredible complexity of past societies and the unpredictable ways that individuals made meaning for themselves within them.5 Where Cipolla’s works provide a framework for understanding plague outbreaks in seventeenth-century Italy, Calvi’s book probes what these events meant to the individuals who experienced them.6Instead of Cipolla’s public health officers, Calvi’s account introduces us, on a first-name basis (which I will follow in this essay), to the myriad motivations of individuals within the city of Florence who violated public health measures. Quoting extensively from first-person testimonies from more than three hundred trials, Calvi parses what these individuals said, and did not say, in the courts of the special judicial tribunal of the Florentine Public Health Magistracy, which was empowered to act during outbreaks of plague. Where Cipolla’s protagonists closed people in their houses for quarantine, sent the sick to lazarettos, and provisioned those who were quarantined in their homes, Calvi reminds us that a closed house with occupants removed was an invitation to thieves. But even thefts in Calvi’s analysis are replete with meanings. Relatives removed items from each other’s closed houses to solidify family ties and pass on their patrimony, and even neighbors could occasionally be expected to return goods if their owners succeeded in returning from the lazarettos. Calvi’s attention to the meanings of possessions is jarring in our culture of excess, especially as those excesses are made starkly visible by our current moment of unexpected shortages.Calvi’s analyses also reveal Florentines’ fluency with the plague and public health measures. The neighbors of Angelica di Giovanni Bandini were familiar enough with the public health laws that when Angelica was taken in a rush to the lazaretto, leaving her sheets still soaking in the laundry, her neighbors were able to petition for access to her house to save the linens. Florentines were punished for public health violations, but they also knew how to work within the laws for their own benefit. Plague outbreaks contained moments of comedic relief against a background of widespread tragedy. A Florentine official became suspicious when Michelangiolo di Vettorio Incontri reported that a neighbor in his building was sick with plague—a decision that would lead to the closure and quarantining of his own connected residence. When questioned by the official, Michelangiolo candidly explained that he had recently been evicted from his rooms by the owner of the property (presumably for failure to pay rent), but “now that the disease is with us, we don’t want to violate the law. People can’t be evicted from infectious houses” (p. 97). Michelangiolo, a poor renter, knew how to use his neighbor’s misfortune to his own advantage. Taking in Calvi’s examples after reading Cipolla’s books allows us to see his accounts in a different light: the violent responses of the destitute quarantined masses that Cipolla describes were not instinctive backlash but reactions circumscribed by existing familial, economic, and religious experiences.As we are reminded in this first wave of the COVID pandemic, a common pathogen does not entail a comparable experience of epidemic. It would likewise be a mistake to overstate the similarities of the outbreak of plague in the societies that Calvi and Cipolla describe. Regulatory actions and societal reactions in the face of the epidemic surely differed between Calvi’s urban and cosmopolitan Florentines and the small Tuscan towns and rural countryside of Cipolla’s heroes. Calvi’s Histories of a Plague Year also uncovers the highly differentiated and gendered responses activated by outbreaks of plague. When people recognized the telltale buboes on a family member, they would divide according to gendered roles to protect the family’s economic output. Men grabbed mattresses and a pot and moved to the family’s workshop or retail space, where they carried on their business while sleeping on the floor. Women, children, and sick family members were left in the houses, which authorities would then lock from the outside after transporting the visibly ill to lazarettos. These cases emerged repeatedly in the public health tribunal’s records, as men were prosecuted for hiding cases of plague or for “working despite the contagion.”In recent months, we have designated the people who must continue to go to work during the coronavirus pandemic “essential workers” who deserve praise for their sacrifices on behalf of the community. However, Calvi’s book reveals that the greater sacrifice in early modern eyes was staying home, not working, and trying to survive on the small government assistance that Cipolla’s protagonists delivered in baskets through upper-story windows. While plague doctors were notoriously hard to recruit, Calvi’s and Cipolla’s accounts depict not only the mortal risk but also the relative stability and power that gravediggers, fumigators, low-level commissioners, bailiffs, and guards faced and commanded during the social and economic crisis of a plague outbreak. Jacopo Jacopi, a public health official charged with distributing charity to those in the bustling neighborhood around the Basilica of Santa Croce, was shocked to find “only thirty-one people … [and] the group consisted of only one man … with the rest women and children.” He reflected on the gendered nature of work and the results of the plague ordinances: “This confirms what I had heretofore believed,” he reported, “that is, that any man who can earn more than one giulio, the amount we give for support, does not want to stay home” (p. 133). To early modern people with few possessions and without savings, work itself was essential.On International Women’s Day 2020, Italians in several northern provinces were confined to their homes. The next day, the Italian government extended its lockdown to the whole country. Calvi’s Histories of a Plague Year reveals that in the locked houses of early modernity—disproportionately full of stricken women and children—women played an important role in health and healing.7 Calvi relates an episode involving the corpse of an unnamed pregnant woman that was carried out the front door into the street. Inspection by a doctor and a barber surgeon revealed a bubo on her left thigh, leading the medical men to explain in testimony “that people in the house say [the wound] was caused by fire, as though she had burned herself there” (p. 84). The mark, Calvi explains, was a cauterization, likely performed by the woman herself, using one of the iron pokers by her kitchen fire to drain the bubo. This unnamed woman, living in poverty in a shared house, had in fact carried out a technique that the learned medical establishment practiced regularly and wrote about in books. In addition to the occasional instances of women formally employed as plague surgeons, Calvi shows that medical knowledge about plague was widespread throughout all levels of Florentine society.8 The lazarettos became training sites for “clandestine domestic healers,” and women cared for patients in their homes (p. 104). Even the language of spoken testimonies in the trials reveals a fluency with medical terms in the descriptions of plague symptoms, while witnesses’ accounts of other diseases maintained separate, vernacular discourses. Plague was experienced differently based on individuals’ class and gender, but it was discussed using a shared vocabulary.On Mother’s Day 2020, as Italy began to reopen, newspapers around the globe ran editorials reflecting on the challenges of new motherhood during the coronavirus pandemic. The dangers of pregnancy during plague outbreaks similarly feature in the testimonies of Calvi’s Florentines. Lisabetta, the daughter of a shopkeeper on Via dell’Agnolo, was put on trial and accused of paying doctors to treat her secretly. The doctor and barber surgeon thus faced the real possibility of accusations that they hid people sick with plague. Burning with fever and discovering a bubo on her thigh, the pregnant Lisabetta had called on the barber surgeon, Jacopo da Massa, who had come to treat her with bloodletting, lancing her bubo, and finally administering a purge, which induced a miscarriage. To protect the surgeon during the trial, Lisabetta claimed that the miscarriage had occurred before the telltale signs of plague and that her mother had, in Lisabetta’s words, “treated the bubo with pork fat” (p. 86). (Despite Lisabetta’s fabrication about her mother’s intervention, it is clear from other trials that women were adept at caring for plague symptoms.) After her surgery and subsequent miscarriage, Lisabetta and her sister Maria, who had also received treatment for a lesion, returned to work in their father’s shop, wearing bandages around the weeping wounds under their skirts. For thirty-two scudi a day, medical officials had clandestinely treated the women with the complicity of their family so that they could return to work. But this account, as detailed by Calvi, is about more than the trade of illicit medical services for money. Lisabetta exchanged a chance at saving her own life for the certain death of her fetus. Indeed, the narratives of pregnancy and plague infection repeatedly likened the buboes of plague to monstrous pregnancies that required the sacrifice of either woman or fetus, if not both.For Lisabetta, ridding her body simultaneously of plague and fetus to preserve her life was a literal exchange, but for early moderns there were also spiritual and ritual meanings in sacrifices. Calvi’s account of the canonization hearings of the mystic Domenica Nardini da Paradiso serves as a provocative reminder that the spiritual and medical realms have long occupied overlapping territories. Domenica, a servant turned Dominican abbess, had many miracles attributed to her in both life and death. Her miraculous last gesture to the city of Florence was a ritual exchange: Domenica spared Florence from the 1527 plague by imploring God “to gather all of the Florentine plague into her body, and then to accept all of her blood, to be poured from her veins, offering all that she had in an exchange” (p. 209). After her death in 1527, items that belonged to Domenica or came into contact with her body continued miraculously to save people from plague. Calvi astutely compares the putrid, blackened, and rotting corpses of plague victims that doctors examined with Domenica’s sweet fragrance, rosy skin, and intact body—which, according to Antonio Medici, one of the physicians tasked in 1630 with inspecting her exhumed corpse, had “no sign of infection or corruption” (p. 222). The plague epidemic of 1630–1633 connected the past events of Domenica’s life with the miracles of the present. Domenica’s miraculous acts in life and death have the effect of breaking and bridging the traditional chronologies and narratives of epidemics. As historians of science and medicine, we should not neglect the ways that people’s nonrational experiences of epidemics intersect with public health and the experience of disease.Rereading the literature about early modern plague during the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded me that this very exercise of reflecting on an epidemic from within it is one of the coping mechanisms to which humans have repeatedly turned to make sense of our experiences during these difficult moments. Through the tribunals of the Florentine Public Health Magistracy and the canonization proceedings of the Congregation of Rites, we enter into discursive outlets through which individuals who rarely enter the written record of history explained their logics and their actions, albeit in contexts of coerced participation and sometimes violent consequences. Albiera de’ Guiducci, a recent widow from the hard-hit neighborhood of Sant’Ambrogio in Florence, testified in Domenica’s 1630 canonization hearings about her family’s distant history with Domenica and the recent miraculous cure of her seven-year-old daughter, Costanza. Doctors had affirmed that the child would die, but her full recovery after consuming bread and being touched by “a little red cross that … had touched Domenica’s body” led Albiera to believe that “this was a sign of grace, especially considering that these are strange times, dangerous and contagious” (p. 228). From within our own “strange times, dangerous and contagious,” historians can take the opportunity to follow Albiera’s example and look for new meanings in the familiar territory of past and present.NotesHannah Marcus is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (Chicago, 2020) and the translator of Camilla Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy (Toronto, 2020). Science Center, Room 371, Harvard University, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; [email protected].Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Allan Brandt, Maria Pia Donato, and Paula Findlen for their comments on early drafts of this essay, which I wrote while sponsored by Fellowship FEL-267442-20 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.1 The works I have centered in this essay are Carlo M. Cipolla, Cristofano and the Plague (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1973); Cipolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979); Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1981); and Giulia Calvi, Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence, trans. Dario Biocca and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1989). Subsequent references to Calvi’s book are indicated in the text by page number.2 Cipolla’s work is part of a long tradition of Italian scholars studying plague in society. Cipolla spent many years working in the United States, and his books were translated and found wide readership among anglophone scholars. I encourage readers to follow notes from the English texts cited in this essay into the vast literature in Italian related to plague and public health. It is worth noting, additionally, that Cipolla’s final book about disease, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age, trans. Elizabeth Potter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), examines sources, chronologies, and diseases quite different from those treated in the volumes discussed here.3 Demographic data from early modern plagues continues to be productive for historical research. See Guido Alfani and Marco Bonetti, “A Survival Analysis of the Last Great European Plagues: The Case of Nonantola (Northern Italy) in 1630,” Population Studies, 2019, 73:101–118; and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., and Alfani, “Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2007, 38:177–205.4 Charles E. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective,” Daedalus, 1989, 118(2):1–17.5 For an overview in English of Italian microhistory see Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies, 2001, 2(1), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq#author.6 John Henderson’s recent book, Florence under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2019), brings together both of these traditions in what he describes as a “total history” of Florence’s 1629–1633 plague epidemic.7 The subject of women’s health and healing has been much more thoroughly explored since Calvi’s Histories of a Plague Year was published in English in 1989. See, e.g., Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006); Elaine Yuen Tien Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2018); and Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2019).8 Regarding the employment of women as plague surgeons see Jane Stevens Crawshaw, “Families, Medical Secrets, and Public Health in Early Modern Venice,” Renaissance Studies, 2014, 28:606–609. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 111, Number 4December 2020 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712384 Views: 1233 © 2020 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.