Between 1725 and 1735, Michael Ranft, a Lutheran clergyman born in Saxony, published a book titled De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (Concerning the dead who chew in their graves), the German edition of which bears...
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The places probably hit the hardest by the first wave of the Covid-19-pandemic, have been retirement and nursing homes. In Britain, the USA and Germany, for example, between a fifth and a staggering 60% of all Covid-related deaths have occurred in such institutions, despite accounting for a much smaller share of the overall number of Covid-infected individuals.
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Throughout history, fear of infectious disease was used to incite fear and hatred of ethnic, cultural, and religious ‘other’. In Episode 3, Gašper Jakovac is hosting Prof. Ann Thomson (EUI) to discuss writings of Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), who in the 1780s wrote two extremely hostile accounts of the Ottoman Empire. Find out more about how the plague highlights Volney’s anti-Muslim prejudice.
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While researching historical plague during a pandemic has been a strangely soothing experience for me, I’ve been told it has made me rather difficult to talk to. “You keep saying the situation isn’t as bad as the literal Black Death, like that’s a comfort,” a friend said, making it clear that it was not at all a comfort, that she had learned more about the symptoms of bubonic plague than she cared to, and could we perhaps talk about something else?
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Hosts
The Experiencing Epidemics editorial team:
Jorge Díaz
Jorge Díaz Ceballos is a historian of the early modern Spanish Empire. His work deals with the construction of transatlantic political and legal cultures in the early 16th century and the negotiation of power in imperial settings.
Ian Hathaway
Ian Hathaway is a historian of the early modern Mediterranean. His research interests focus on the history of mobility, identification, and cross-cultural contact.
Gašper Jakovac
Gašper Jakovac is a cultural and literary historian of the early modern period. His research focuses on drama, performance, popular culture, and religious politics in Protestant England.