Plague Outbreaks Research Articles

Phylogenetic analysis of the origin and spread of plague in Madagascar

Plague is a zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, highly prevalent in the Central Highlands, a mountainous region in the center of Madagascar. After a plague-free period of over 60 years in the northwestern coast city of Mahajanga, the disease reappeared in 1991 and caused several outbreaks until 1999. Previous research indicates that the disease was reintroduced to the city of Mahajanga from the Central Highlands instead of reemerging from a local reservoir. However, it is not clear how many reintroductions occurred and when they took place. In this study we applied a Bayesian phylogeographic model to detect and date migrations of Y. pestis between the two locations that could be linked to the re-emergence of plague in Mahajanga. Genome sequences of 300 Y. pestis strains sampled between 1964 and 2012 were analyzed. Four migrations from the Central Highlands to Mahajanga were detected. Two resulted in persistent transmission in humans, one was responsible for most of the human cases recorded between 1995 and 1999, while the other produced plague cases in 1991 and 1992. We dated the emergence of the Y. pestis sub-branch 1.ORI3, which is only present in Madagascar and Turkey, to the beginning of the 20th century, using a Bayesian molecular dating analysis. The split between 1.ORI3 and its ancestor lineage 1.ORI2 was dated to the second half of the 19th century. Our results indicate that two independent migrations from the Central Highlands caused the plague outbreaks in Mahajanga during the 1990s, with both introductions occurring during the early 1980s. They happened over a decade before the detection of human cases, thus the pathogen likely survived in wild reservoirs until the spillover to humans was possible. This study demonstrates the value of Bayesian phylogenetics in elucidating the re-emergence of infectious diseases.

Mortal Remains as Biohazard

This article examines French efforts to disrupt the transfer of two thousand Chinese remains from Sài Gòn–Chợ Lớn to Hong Kong in 1892. French officials cited biohazardous threats as grounds for legal interdiction, infuriating Cantonese leaders who demanded the removal of bureaucratic obstacles to repatriations. Situating French epidemiology within a global bubonic plague outbreak, this article shows how colonial panic activated a racialized biopolitics that demonized Chinese bodies as plague-borne menaces and justified drastic measures. As interimperial competitions for biomedical research intensified, transnational Chinese practices, perceived as undermining public health initiatives, became a flashpoint of conflicts over hygiene, mobility, and interethnic interactions.

War on Rats: the architecture of the bubonic plague in Galveston

Galveston, Texas is one of the oldest seaport cities in the Gulf of Mexico west of New Orleans, making it a historically prime location for disease outbreaks. The bubonic plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, likely spread to Galveston via infected rats and fleas on steamboats. Known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague infected 17 Galvestonians from 1920 to 1921. This article examines the “War on Rats,” the public health response to the Galveston bubonic plague outbreak in the 1920s. As part of public health practices at the time, the rat-proofing of buildings provides a glimpse into the intersection of public health and architecture. This exploration of the war on rats in Galveston offers insights into 20th-century examples of cross-disciplinary collaboration to promote human health in urban contexts.

EPIDEMIC (COMMUNICABLE) DISEASES ON LESBOS ISLAND (1890-1912)

Lesbos Island was one of the first places where quarantine was applied in the Ottoman Empire due to its location. Many diseases such as smallpox, measles, cholera, rabies, meningitis, typhoid, and plague were widespread on the island. The plague, which broke out in 1907 had great effects on the island.With the outbreak of the plague, precautions had to be taken in many places, especially in the island and Istanbul, to which it was connected. A bacteriologist was brought from Istanbul and Izmir for the diagnosis of the cases, and measures were taken accordingly. The plague, which spread in a short time, infected two confectioner’s apprentices who came into contact with the dead mice in the sacks; the number of contacts increased after one of the shopkeepers, Grocery Yorgi, threw the mouse away. The symptoms of the plague in the baker’s apprentice were understood from the inguinal swelling. The plague also spread to Anatolia from those who went from Lesbos to Dikili. The government attempted to treat plague with medication. Given the course and spread of the disease, serum was brought from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and used as a treatment. The plague, which first appeared on Lesbos Island in 1907, continued for three months; was prevented by quarantines and tight cordons. The public was not satisfied with the disease prevention and the assistance provided. In particular, the financing of health maintenance by local municipalities resulted in social unrest. In this study the diseases that occurred in Lesbos Island and how the plague, which occurred in 1907, affected the island and surrounding sanjaks were examined based on the documents. The studies of the Ottoman Empire especially on protection of public health and how they struggled with diseases were discussed.

A big data-model integration approach for predicting epizootics and population recovery in a keystone species.

Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health and biodiversity. Yet, predicting the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife epizootics remains challenging. Disease outbreaks result from complex nonlinear interactions among a large collection of variables that rarely adhere to the assumptions of parametric regression modeling. We adopted a nonparametric machine learning approach to model wildlife epizootics and population recovery, using the disease system of colonial black-tailed prairie dogs (BTPD, Cynomys ludovicianus) and sylvatic plague as an example. We synthesized colony data between 2001 and 2020 from eight USDA Forest Service National Grasslands across the range of BTPDs in central North America. We then modeled extinctions due to plague and colony recovery of BTPDs in relation to complex interactions among climate, topoedaphic variables, colony characteristics, and disease history. Extinctions due to plague occurred more frequently when BTPD colonies were spatially clustered, in closer proximity to colonies decimated by plague during the previous year, following cooler than average temperatures the previous summer, and when wetter winter/springs were preceded by drier summers/falls. Rigorous cross-validations and spatial predictions indicated that our final models predicted plague outbreaks and colony recovery in BTPD with high accuracy (e.g., AUC generally >0.80). Thus, these spatially explicit models can reliably predict the spatial and temporal dynamics of wildlife epizootics and subsequent population recovery in a highly complex host-pathogen system. Our models can be used to support strategic management planning (e.g., plague mitigation) to optimize benefits of this keystone species to associated wildlife communities and ecosystem functioning. This optimization can reduce conflicts among different landowners and resource managers, as well as economic losses to the ranching industry. More broadly, our big data-model integration approach provides a general framework for spatially explicit forecasting of disease-induced population fluctuations for use in natural resource management decision-making.

The Establishment of the Concept of Shu Yi and Its Significance in the History of Knowledge

Plague is one of the severe infectious diseases which has had a huge impact on human society throughout history. Although there is abundant research on the disease, few studies focus on the concept of plague itself. It is generally believed that Shu Yi was first coined by Chinese doctors in the late 19th century, and it was closely related to the introduction of new medicine. This statement is not accurate, because plague was prevalent in Yunnan and Guangdong provinces in the late Qing Dynasty. At that time, people had already recognized the relationship between the outbreak of plague and the death of rats, and gradually named the epidemic disease as Shu Yi. This name was used by literati and doctors by coincidence. As the epidemic became more and more serious, more related works were widely disseminated, and Shu Yi changed from a folk name to a formal name. Later, with the help of the government’s active introduction of modern health and epidemic prevention mechanisms and the implementation of rodent control measures, Shu Yi became more popular and gradually recognized by all walks of society. The emergence and prevalence of Shu Yi created the history of zoonosis in China, and thus formed a new paradigm of naming human epidemics after related animal names.

Doctoring the Black Death, Medieval Europe’s Medical Response to Plague by John Aberth

Reviewed by: Doctoring the Black Death, Medieval Europe’s Medical Response to Plague by John Aberth Vivian Nutton John Aberth. Doctoring the Black Death, Medieval Europe’s Medical Response to Plague. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. xii + 486 pp. $39.00 (978-0-7425-5723-9). Between 1911 and 1925, the German medical historian Karl Sudhoff published or commented on some 288 treatises on plague dating from 1346 to 1500. It was a remarkable achievement, for many tracts were difficult to find in a world without the Internet. John Aberth, who is well known for his studies of the Black Death, has extended Sudhoff’s work in many ways, not least by including material in a variety of languages, including Hebrew, that his predecessor had omitted. Plague historians have now a wonderful resource in English that will answer many of the questions about what doctors thought and did when confronted with a plague. Many fled (the section on flight is one of the best in the book); others stayed behind, willingly or unwillingly, to treat and advise their fellow citizens or their patron and his family. The book is divided into four long chapters, dealing respectively with medieval accounts of causes (including the wrath of God); the signs practitioners recognized (or perhaps missed); prevention; and therapy, all clearly subdivided and provided with tables that allow one to judge easily what was typical and what was more idiosyncratic. There is a short introduction and an even shorter conclusion, allied to very brief summaries at the end of each chapter. It is exhaustively footnoted, and, where I have checked the originals, the translations are clear and accurate. Building on Fred Gibbs’s works on poisons, the author emphasizes that many doctors believed that plague was in some way poisonous, a novel approach in his view that contradicted or downgraded the belief in classical Galenic humoral medicine.1 The notion that the infective agent worked like poison through what later became known as an occult or invisible cause (the make-up of its total substance) was, it is suggested, more empirical than what had gone before and gave little place for an individual’s humoral balance. This may be unfair to Galen, who certainly understood the importance of observation and empirical testing when dealing with many drugs, although he said little about epidemic disease in his surviving works, despite his experiences in several “plagues.” The Arabs had also developed his ideas on the potency of substances, as learned medieval physicians well knew. The author often comments on what to him are incompatible explanations or practices, but the doctrine of humors was still significant in thinking about prevention and cure. As the author explains briefly, there was a general belief in a hierarchy of causes, ranging from the wrath of God; the position of the stars and [End Page 157] planets; to air and its possible constituents, including poison; and finally to an individual’s humoral imbalance. Bleeding, which corrected the mixture of humors transported in blood, was thought to restore any imbalance as well as remove poisonous substances. What a doctor considered the most significant cause was an open choice, not necessarily identical to that of his patients or civic authorities. Within its limits as a careful description of these pest tracts, this is an excellent piece of work, but many wider questions go unanswered. Some of these tracts were written ostensibly for a private patron, others to warn or inform the community as a whole. But it is not clear how most were produced or circulated or how some appear to have gained greater authority than others. How this information was produced and transmitted in manuscript may differ from what came after 1470 (one of the reasons why very few authors later than 1450 are discussed here). Even a brief glance at the early printed plague tracts would have helped to estimate the significance of an academic author like Gentile da Foligno over that of a local author like Heinrich Lamme of Lübeck. Although comparisons are made with later bacteriology and particularly with plague outbreaks in the early twentieth century, an opportunity is missed to investigate Fracastoro’s dependence on his...

Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon

Reviewed by: Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon Rachel Core Wayne Soon. Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020. ix + 312 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-1-5036-1400-0). Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic fixated the attention of armchair epidemiologists on China’s contributions to global health, scholars had begun to recenter China’s importance within global health histories.1 Wayne Soon’s recent volume contributes to this literature by highlighting the role of overseas Chinese—both within Asia and globally—in building biomedical care, education, [End Page 167] and institutions in Mainland China and Taiwan, especially during the 1937–45 war and postwar years. In particular, the book weaves together the contributions of three ethnic Chinese from Singapore and Malaysia. First, Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated physician from Penang, became a central figure in controlling the 1910–11 Manchurian Plague outbreak. Following the outbreak, Wu established the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service and convened an International Plague Conference, which brought foreign financial support for disease control. Second, the book examines the unsuccessful attempts of Lim Boon Keng to create a medical school at Xiamen University. Finally, most of the book focuses on Lim Boon Keng’s son, Robert Lim, who like his father, was born in Singapore and educated in Edinburgh. Robert Lim took lessons from his father’s experience, helped to diversify the Peking Union Medical College, and built successful biomedical institutions including: the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps (CRCMRC), blood banks, an Emergency Medical Services Training School (EMSTS), and the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC). While elites championed urban biomedical institutions in prewar China, Chapter 2 details how with financial and voluntary support from overseas Chinese, the CRCMRC adapted to local conditions in 1937–45 China. Specifically, Robert Lim led efforts to develop mobile medical units, which prioritized preventive medical interventions. Because “most soldiers suffered from diseases, rather than wounds,” the CRCMRC emphasized immunization, delousing to reduce scabies and relapsing fever, and improved nutrition (p. 63). As described in Chapter 3, Robert Lim used the priority of improved nutrition to incentivize donations to blood banks. Originally, few Chinese supported blood donation, believing it “would deplete their vitality”; however, Lim’s team offer of eggs and soymilk changed the calculus for would-be donors in wartime China (p. 96). In May 1938, Lim founded the EMSTS, which responded to the urgent need for medical providers by training military personnel in a three-month course. As Chapter 4 argues, the Chinese Communist Party would build upon the precedent of providing practical medical education after 1949; however, Robert Lim hoped the schools where the medics received basic training would evolve “to become comprehensive medical centers,” providing a six-year training course (p. 132). On this point, the leader of the United China Relief (UCR), a United States–based organization that funded the EMSTS, lambasted Lim, claiming that this aspiration was impractical. The exchange between Lim and URC illustrated the precariousness of relying on overseas donors, yet Lim was eventually able to build a more comprehensive medical training program. The final chapter illustrates how the NDMC—which had both vocational and academic tracks—was built in Shanghai after the war, and moved to Taiwan in 1948. This meticulous study is based upon research in more than twenty archives and libraries on three continents. In addition to re-centering the role of the Chinese diaspora in global health history, Soon follows both monetary donations and disagreements about how to best develop biomedicine across boundaries, both geopolitical and temporal. The book crosses the Taiwan Strait to examine Taiwan’s successful blood donation program and universal health care system as [End Page 168] legacies Robert Lim’s vision. The account also spans the 1949-divide in Mainland China, contributing to the growing body of scholarship highlighting continuities in medical care provision in the 1950s and beyond.2 Soon’s claim that the Chinese Communist Party “fostered a sense of wartime urgency,” allowing for biomedical expansion deserves explication in future scholarship, but his own contribution on the importance of wartime institutions to the development of biomedicine in China is...

Islamic Civilizations and Plagues: The Role of Religion, Faith and Psychology During Pandemics.

The current study seeks to analyze Muslim experiences of communicative diseases with a focus on the psychosocial impacts and public, communal, and personal responses of Muslim populations throughout history. By examining a selection of plague outbreaks between the 8-19th centuries across the lands broadly defined as the Islamic Mediterranean (Varlık, 2017), the guidelines and coping mechanisms that Muslims extracted from their traditional sources are highlighted. This historical perspective contributes to a better understanding of the psychological and social aspects of pandemics for theMuslim community, specifically for the role played by faith and spirituality as determinants of psychological well-being in Muslims' perceptions and responses. We suggest that such an understanding is especially useful for contemporary mental health practitioners working with Muslim patients through the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Histories of Medieval Plague in Renaissance Italy.

During the sixteenth century, Italian scholars revised their conception of the field of history so that its purposes went beyond providing political and morally edifying narratives. These scholars contended that history must also account for culture and nature in an encyclopedic fashion. In the same years, numerous newly available texts from antiquity, the Byzantine empire, and the Middle Ages provided insight into the character of earlier outbreaks of plague. Italian physicians, embracing new visions of the field of history, the culture of humanism, and an inductivist epistemology, used these texts to argue that there were continuities among ancient, medieval, and Renaissance epidemics. They catalogued plague and formed historical categories based on severity and perceived origins, leading to the rejection of the conclusions of fourteenth-century western Europeans who viewed the plague of 1347-1353 as unprecedented. These erudite physicians saw medieval plague to be one example of the extreme epidemics that have regularly occurred throughout history.

Buffering Anxiety of Pandemics: A Post-pandemic Perspective to Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion

This interdisciplinary study aims to explore the psychological impact of pandemics in cinema with a special reference to Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion. The study refers to Orhan Pamuk’s essay, “What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us” (2020), about Pandemic novels where he traces the common initial responses to the outbreak of a pandemic by comparing the current coronavirus pandemic and the historical outbreaks of plague and cholera pinpointing the traits attributed to pandemics and suggesting other psychological defense mechanisms. In this respect, the study attempts exploring the re-contextualization of Pamuk’s ideologies in cinema through shedding the light on the functions of camera angle shots, colors, sound effects, point of view, and flashbacks.

Plague and Politics in Genoa (1528-1664)

The article examines Genoese responses to plague during the old regime. Much like the Venetian, the Genoese ruling class understood the nexus between plague, poverty, and famine, and how these, in turn, tied in with political unrest. Some of the Republic’s main political and diplomatic crises were indeed followed by severe outbreaks of plague. Thus, the 1528 plague marked the proclamation of the oligarchic Republic, as a Spanish protectorate, masterminded by Andrea Doria, whereas the 1579-1580 plague closed the civil wars (a struggle of the old patriciate against an alliance of the new patriciate with the popular faction, 1575-1576). While the plague that swept through northern Italy in 1628-1630 narrowly missed Genoa, it became a metaphor with Genoese political thinkers for the narrowly escaped annexation of the Republic by Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy (who died of plague in his encampment, together with scores of the heretics on his payroll). The 1656-1657 epidemic was the most severe in the Genoese old regime, capping an acute political and jurisdictional crisis with Rome and with archbishop Stefano Durazzo. Remarkable documents of this enduring state of conflict are the prayer composed by Paolo Foglietta (poet and brother to Oberto, who was a leader in the civil wars and later a historian of the Republic) invoking an end to the 1579-1580 epidemic, and the anonymous preghiera repubblicana (held at the Vatican Apostolic Archive) which the government of the Republic included in the official religious liturgy in response to a heated jurisdictional crisis with the Holy See (1605-1607). Rome ordered archbishop Orazio Spinola to have the prayer banned, but the ‘Collegi’ of the Republic attempted to have it reinstated following the 1656-1657 plague.
 
 D. Fiasella, La peste a Genova (1658 ca.), Courtesy of Archivio Fotografico Fondazione Franzoni, ETS – Genova

Cytosolic and mitochondrial ribosomal proteins mediate the locust phase transition via divergence of translational profiles

The phase transition from solitary to gregarious locusts is crucial in outbreaks of locust plague, which threaten agricultural yield and food security. Research on the regulatory mechanisms of phase transition in locusts has focused primarily on the transcriptional or posttranslational level. However, the translational regulation of phase transition is unexplored. Here, we show a phase-dependent pattern at the translation level, which exhibits different polysome profiles between gregarious and solitary locusts. The gregarious locusts exhibit significant increases in 60S and polyribosomes, while solitary locusts possess higher peaks of the monoribosome and a specific "halfmer." The polysome profiles, a molecular phenotype, respond to changes in population density. In gregarious locusts, ten genes involved in the cytosolic ribosome pathway exhibited increased translational efficiency (TE). In solitary locusts, five genes from the mitochondrial ribosome pathway displayed increased TE. The high expression of large ribosomal protein 7 at the translational level promotes accumulation of the free 60S ribosomal subunit in gregarious locusts, while solitary locusts employ mitochondrial small ribosomal protein 18cto induce the assembly of mitochondrial ribosomes, causing divergence of the translational profiles and behavioral transition. This study reveals the translational regulatory mechanism of locust phase transition, in which the locusts employ divergent ribosome pathways to cope with changes in population density.

MStrain: strain-level identification of Yersinia pestis using metagenomic data.

High-resolution target pathogen detection using metagenomic sequencing data represents a major challenge due to the low concentration of target pathogens in samples. We introduced mStrain, a novel Yesinia pestis strain/lineage-level identification tool that utilizes metagenomic data. mStrain successfully identified Y. pestis at the strain/lineage level by extracting sufficient information regarding single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which can therefore be an effective tool for identification and source tracking of Y. pestis based on metagenomic data during a plague outbreak. . Assigning the reads in the metagenomic sequencing data to an exactly known or most closely representative Y. pestis strain. Assigning the reads in the metagenomic sequencing data to a specific lineage on the phylogenetic tree. The unique and typical SNPs present in all representative strains. An SNP is defined as the ancestor state when consistent with the allele of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis strain IP32953; otherwise, the SNP is defined as the derived state. The code for running mStrain, the test dataset, and instructions for running the code can be found at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/xwqian1123/mStrain.

Aiming for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic: the what, how, who, where, and when.

Aiming for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic: the what, how, who, where, and when.

Plague outbreak in Madagascar amidst COVID-19: A re-emerging concern of public health

Plague outbreak in Madagascar amidst COVID-19: A re-emerging concern of public health

ОБЗОР ЭПИЗООТИЧЕСКОЙ СИТУАЦИИ ПО ЧУМЕ МЕЛКИХ ЖВАЧНЫХ ЖИВОТНЫХ В МИРЕ С ПРИМЕНЕНИЕМ КАРТОГРАФИЧЕСКИХ ИНСТРУМЕНТОВ

Plague of small ruminants (PPR) is a highly contagious, transboundary disease. This emerging disease, along with bluetongue, is most frequently reported among small ruminants. The PPR pathogen can infect up to 100% of susceptible animals. The disease occurs most often in hyperacute, acute, and subacute forms, while from 30 to 70% of patients die. In this regard, the purpose of this work was to analyze the current epizootic situation of PPR in the world from 2018 to 2022. Primary data on epizootic outbreaks of plague of small ruminants for the period 2018-2022 in the world were taken from the international FAO Empress database. Statistical data processing was carried out using the tools of the Microsoft Excel 2016 program. Cartographic analysis of the PPR epizootic situation was carried out using ArcGis 10.4 GIS software. The authors of this article carried out a cartographic analysis of outbreaks of the disease under study, from which it follows that most of the PPR outbreaks are concentrated in Africa and Asia. The most affected regions are in the zone of North Africa (Algeria, Morocco), as well as Asia (Mongolia and the People's Republic of China). The results of data analysis showed that more than half (59%) of all PPR outbreaks in the world were registered in 2019. 15% in 2018, 13% in 2021, 7% in 2020. The PPR stationarity index for the period under review was 0.6 in Algeria, Israel, China, Morocco; in Bulgaria, Libya, Mongolia - 0.4; in the rest of the above territories by 0.2, respectively.

Pheno- and genotypic characteristics of Yersinia pestis strains from phylogroups 2.MED4 and 2.MED1 – etiological agents of 20th-century plague outbreaks in the Caspian Sea region

ABSTRACT We conducted a comparative analysis of the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of plague pathogen strains from the 2.MED4 and 2.MED1 phylogroups, representing the main subspecies of the medieval Yersinia pestis biovar found in the plague foci of the Caspian Sea region, which were epidemically active in the 20th century. We evaluated the biochemical properties, nutritional requirements, and plasmid profiles of Y. pestis strains within the 2.MED4 and 2.MED1 phylogroups of the medieval biovar. We discovered the variability in the virulence-associated genes hemS, caf1M, and ssaJ in the strains of the 2.MED lineage. Our data on the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of the medieval biovar can be used in laboratory diagnostics of the plague microbe and contribute to the understanding of genomic changes during the microevolution of this highly virulent biovar.

COLONIAL UNREASON: GANDHI’S REACTION TO THE PLAGUE AND PERSECUTION IN COLONIAL SOUTH AFRICA

During his stay in Colonial South Africa over a period of almost twenty-one years, he witnessed a wanton exhibition of colonial unreason by the British. The ‘colonial unreason’ involves the process of legitimization of irrationality in order to achieve control over the colonised subjects. This paper, therefore, deals with Gandhi's reaction to the discriminatory treatment and severe persecution of the British Indians by the colonial dispensation over the outbreak of plague both during and after the second Boer war (from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902). Gandhi wrote extensively about the unleashing of discriminatory action against the British Indians in colonial South Africa as the coloniser apprehended or more often accused maliciously the community of having carried the plague virus. Several measures were taken to punish the Indians apart from the prevailing colonial coercion. In the name of precaution or prevention, punishments and unlawful segregation were taken up as the new normal. This was nothing new in the colonial normative. It was rather a rigorous intensification of the already prevailing colonial modes of control. The champions of reason, liberalism and human rights legitimized unreason as an instrument of control or public safety. In the name of prevention, persecution became the norm. This research revisits the plague in South Africa through the writings of Gandhi in order to understand the colonial apathy against the British Indians.

:Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

This crisis manifested itself both socially and politically. In addition to the agrarian crises and the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, protests against excessive taxation and abuses by the nobility gave rise to various revolts. Such protests resulted many times in the persecution of the Jewish population in Castile and Aragon. Despite the flourishing literary production that constitutes the archive of the book in question, the Castilian court is marked by dynastic intrigues and clashes between different factions of the nobility. In this context, the texts studied in the present book are concerned with the dialectical relationship between experience and reason that produces passions. The passions would not in turn be mere subjective reactions to the environment, but the product of an experience that allows the individual consciousness to understand itself as such. Hence, the rhetorical importance of deixis in songbook poetry insofar as it establishes a basis on which to build forms of intersubjectivity. Passions give content to this intersubjectivity, demarcating the boundary between the collective and the individual, between the political and the personal. The definition of the passions is produced through an incessant questioning of the poets and their readers. What kind of experience is love? What kind of knowledge does this experience produce? What are its ethical, orienting dimensions in a world that seems characterized by instability and the instrumentalization of personal relationships?